Prefix

This article is about the linguistic feature. For other uses, see Prefix (disambiguation).
A comparison of prepositions and directional prefixes in Greek, Latin, English, and German.
Affixes
See also:

A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word.[1] Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed.

Prefixes, like other affixes, can be either inflectional, creating a new form of a word with the same basic meaning and same lexical category, or derivational, creating a new word with a new semantic meaning and sometimes also a different lexical category.[2] Prefixes, like all affixes, are usually bound morphemes.[1]

English has no inflectional prefixes, using only suffixes for that purpose. Adding a prefix to the beginning of an English word changes it to a different word. For example, when the prefix un- is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy.

The word prefix is itself made up of the stem fix (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix pre- (meaning "before"), both of which are derived from Latin roots.

  1. ^ a b Wilson 2011, p. 152–153.
  2. ^ Beard, Robert (1998). "She Derivation". The Handbook of Morphology. Blackwell. pp. 44–45.