Cranberry morpheme

In linguistic morphology, a cranberry morpheme (or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an independent meaning or grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other.

The archetypal example is the cran of cranberry. Unrelated to the homonym cran with the meaning a case of herrings, this cran actually comes from crane (the bird), although the connection is not immediately evident. Similarly, mul exists only in mulberry (mul is from Latin , the mulberry tree). Phonetically, the first morpheme of raspberry also counts as a cranberry morpheme, even though the word "rasp" does occur by itself. Compare these with blackberry, which has two obvious unbound morphemes, and to loganberry and boysenberry, whose first morphemes are derived from personal names.

Other cranberry morphemes in English include:

Cranberry morphemes can arise in several ways:

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