What do you call it when you “extend” a word? [closed]

Question

On a programming site, I noticed

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37460404/unexplained-increasement-of-variable

a beautiful word use, "increasement."

Is there a term for, or how would you refer to, that - where you take a word, and use a different "form" of it.

So, you're making up a new "form" of a word which has never been seen before, but it makes sense based on variant "forms" of other words.

(This is sometimes done for humorous effect; and small children sometimes do it: in the example at hand it's just plain pretty.)

By the way notice I use "form" above ... perhaps it is not the best term (maybe there's another term, something like "tense" or ?)

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Further - relatedly, it occurs to me that children learning language, particularly do this (often humorously to us adults). Surely, there's a term for this when children do it, since there's plenty of academic interest in such things.

Answer 1

Perhaps you mean the process of attaching suffixes and/or prefixes to a root word to make a whole family of related words, like hand, handy, handiness, unhand, unhanded, and so on. The name for that is agglutination and languages that rely on this kind of word growth for their grammar are called agglutinative. The word itself is an example of Latin agglutination.

• the formation of derivational or inflectional words by putting together constituents of which each expresses a single definite meaning.

(M-W)

Answer 2

When you make up a new word, generally, it's called a "neologism". Does that fit here?

Neologism: (noun)

1. a new word, meaning, usage, or phrase.
2. the introduction or use of new words or new senses of existing words.
3. a new doctrine, especially a new interpretation of sacred writings.
4. Psychiatry. a new word, often consisting of a combination of other words, that is understood only by the speaker: occurring most often in the speech of schizophrenics.

(Dictionary.com)

Answer 3

Increasement is already a word.

• https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/increasement
• http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/increasement
• http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Increasement

But I would offer this Calvin and Hobbes strip:

Although in this case I suppose you're nouning a noun.

Edit: More seriously, you might consider using the verb suffixing:

append, especially as a suffix.

Answer 4

Cobbled together from earlier comments...

Inflection, formerly flection or accidence, in linguistics, the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case.
^{(Encyclopædia Britannica)}

Agglutination is a process in linguistic morphology derivation in which complex words are formed by stringing together morphemes without changing them in spelling or phonetics. ^(Wikipedia)

Some people consider agglutination to be a sub-set of inflection, contrasted with fusional inflection.
^{(reddit/linguistics)}

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The general idea being that agglutinated words always have (meaningful) bits tacked onto them, whereas some inflected ones have their form altered by other means. Thus I think quicksilver, for example, is an example of agglutination, whereas quickly is a simple adverb-forming inflection.

I also think agglutinative is more often an attribute of certain languages (of which English is not considered to be one), but you inflect words (languages aren't usually called "inflective").

Answer 5

Nice answers here already, but the problem with agglutination is that it's a very unusual word that most people will be unfamiliar with. Indeed it sounds rather like the process of adding gluten to something...

I would myself go for more of a comedic term which is itself agglutinated: I would call it Extenderization. Everyone can relate to that term and smile at its usage ;)