Cranberry Morphemes
A cranberry morpheme or unique morpheme is one with extremely limited distribution so that it occurs in only one word. A popular example is cran- in cranberry" (hence the term "cranberry morpheme").
Unique morphemes are examples of the linguistic notion of fossilization: loss of productivity or usage of grammar units: words, phrases, parts of words. Besides fossilized root morphemes, there are also fossilized affixes (suffixes and prefixes).
Read more about this topic: Free Morpheme
Famous quotes containing the word cranberry:
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)