combining form

1871 attestation.

combining form (plural combining forms)

1. (grammar) A type of word part; a bound morpheme; used in combination with a word, a different combining form, or an affix to form a new word.
   • 2007, Matthews, P. H., “combining form”, in The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics, 2nd edition, Oxford [u.a.]: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, pages 63–64:

     Common in English, where in some putative compounds, such as autocrat or technocrat, both members would be combining forms.

   • For more examples of usage of this term, see Citations:combining form.
2. (computing, typography) A character encoded from a sequence of other characters instead of a precomposed character.
   • 2014 April 10, “XML Entity Definitions for Characters (2nd Edition)”, in David Carlisle, Patrick Ion, editor, w3.org‎, World Wide Web Consortium, retrieved 2015-03-22:

     As far as possible this specification uses non-combining characters, however, in the cases tdot, TripleDot and DotDot Unicode only has combining forms of the accents, and so the entity replacement text starts with a space, to avoid the possibility that the expansion of the entity combines with preceding text.

• combining form on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

• “combining form” in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
• combining form at Google Ngram Viewer
• "combining form" in WordNet 3.0, Princeton University, 2006.

• combining form at OneLook Dictionary Search