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🔤 Combining morphemes 🩸 Clumping together
agglutination

agglutination

9.9
Forming words by joining small parts that keep their own form and meaning
  • noun
  • /əˌɡluːtɪˈneɪʃən/
  • Specialized
translation icon : aglutinación
  • The Turkish language uses agglutination to create long words by adding multiple suffixes to a root.

Examples

  • However, when the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters to write their own (non-Sinitic) language, they subsequently developed syllabaries to be used along with Kanji characters for the purposes of marking inflection or other agglutination and transcribing foreign words.

    Academic text (2001)

  • Many indigenous languages exhibit agglutination, allowing for the construction of complex words from simple morphemes.

  • In linguistics, agglutination refers to how words are formed by stringing together morphemes while keeping their individual meanings.

Antonyms

segmentation
3 6.1

Dividing something into separate parts

Compounds

agglutination test
  • Specialized
5.8

A blood test that mixes blood with a known antibody to see clumping that shows blood type or infection

Surface Forms

agglutination singular
agglutinations plural

Morphology

agglutination = agglutinate (semi-transparent) = agglutin + ation

Morphologically regular derivation from 'agglutinate' but the linguistic sense is a specialized, metaphorical extension (gluing morphemes) that may not be obvious to learners from the base verb alone.

Etymology

Agglutination comes from the Latin agglutinare, from ad- 'to' and gluten 'glue'. A helpful image is small word parts like beads 'glued' on a string: in linguistics agglutination means those parts keep their shape and meaning while they join to make larger words.