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In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The line between word formation and semantic change is sometimes a bit blurry; what one person views as a new use of an old word, another person might view as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form; see Conversion (linguistics). Word formation can also be contrasted with the formation of idiomatic expressions, though sometimes words can form from multi-word phrases; see Compound (linguistics) and Incorporation (linguistics).

The following articles describe various mechanisms of word formation:

• Acronym (a word formed from initial letters of the words in a phrase, like English laser from light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation)
• Affix (a morpheme that attaches to a base morpheme to form a word, like re- or -ness)
• Agglutination (the process of forming new words from existing ones by adding affixes to them, like shame + less + ness → shamelessness)
• Back-formation (removing seeming affixes from existing words, like forming edit from editor)
• Clipping (lexicography) (taking part of an existing word, like forming ad from advertisement)
• Compound (linguistics) (a word formed by stringing together older words, like earthquake)
• Conversion (linguistics) (forming a new word from an existing identical one, like forming the verb green from the existing adjective)
• Incorporation (linguistics) (a compound of a verb and an object or particle, like intake)
• Loanword (a word borrowed from another language, like cliché, which comes from French)
• Neologism (a completely new word, like quark)
• Noun adjunct (a noun that modifies another noun, like chicken in chicken soup)
• Portmanteau (a word formed by blending two older words, like smog, which comes from smoke and fog)

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