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There are several words in English starting with touch, such as touchwood, touchstone, touchline, ect. (a list can be found here : http://www.scrabblefinder.com/starts-with/touch/ )

I would like to know if there is some intuition or some rule that can suggest the meaning of (the majority of) these words. Is it true that majority of this words were formed in the same way?

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    The intuition is words which begin with "touch" all derived from the physical, literal act of touching (Google touchstone+etymology, or any other word + etymology, to see what I mean). Beyond that, I'll suggest that there really aren't that many words which begin with "touch", so looking for a governing rule may be overkill.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Sep 15, 2014 at 11:07
  • @DanBron If you include hyphenated words, onelook.com lists about 80.
    – bib
    Commented Sep 15, 2014 at 13:16
  • @bib, if you include hyphenated words, there are ∞ possibilities (because the "morpheme-morpheme" construct is productive). By contrast, using dict.org to search multiple dictionaries for the regular expression ^touch[^ -]+$ returns about 18 results, of which I'd characterize 8 as the "kind of words" OP is looking for (i.e. touch as a prefix for another true morpheme): touchback, touchdown, touchhole, touchstone, touchwood, touchline, touchpad, touchscreen.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented Sep 15, 2014 at 13:54
  • @DanBron The OED has 95 results for keywords starting with touch. But you really shouldn’t talk about productivity: it seems to splode certain minds around here.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Sep 15, 2014 at 20:24
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    @JanusBahsJacquet These days I seem to hear Gallic used for the Caledonian kind. And I of course typo’d it: it should be tocher /ˈtoxər/. Has compounds like “tocher-fee, -gear; tocher-band, a marriage settlement; tocher-good, property given as tocher or dower.” I can just see someone not knowing typical Scots phonology making tocher-good sound like “touch ’er good”. :)
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Sep 15, 2014 at 21:34

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They all have root in the general physical action or state of touch, but the motivation behind each act of touch is so varied that there isn't a single rule of thumb that can provide more specificity.

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