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Glite Dictionary
🔤 To join morphemes 🧲 Stuck together 🩸 To form clumps
to agglutinate

to agglutinate

1 9.8
To add small word parts one after another to change a word's meaning
  • verb
  • /əˈɡluːtɪneɪt/
  • Specialized
translation icon : aglutinare
  • Languages like Turkish often agglutinate words to form complex meanings.

Examples

  • Some languages agglutinate morphemes instead of using word order to express grammatical relations.

  • In Turkish, nouns often agglutinate several suffixes.

  • Linguists study how these languages agglutinate elements to convey nuances of meaning.

  • He agglutinated several morphemes to create a new word.

  • In Finnish, words often agglutinate by adding prefixes and suffixes to convey complex meanings.

  • Turkish is known for its ability to agglutinate, allowing numerous suffixes to be added to a root word.

  • In agglutinating languages, you can agglutinate several morphemes to express an entire idea in a single word.

Antonyms

to disjoin
1 7.4

Separate things that are attached to each other

How Joined

to fuse
44 3.9
to agglutinate
  • Specialized
1 9.8

Surface Forms

agglutinate infinitive
agglutinated past
agglutinated past participle
agglutinating present participle
agglutinates third person singular

Morphology

agglutinate = ag + glutin + ate

The linguistic sense is technical and not directly inferable by an average learner from the Latinate morphemes; the metaphorical extension ('glue' together morphemes) is specialized vocabulary.

Etymology

Agglutinate comes from Latin parts ad- 'to' and gluten 'glue', so a helpful image is small word parts being 'glued' on in a line. That's why in language use it means to join morphemes together so each one adds meaning.