1854: Rebracketing Jan 12, 2020

It would be easy to think that rebracketing—the process of forming words by breaking down others and reaffixing them in previously unproductive ways, e.g. 'workaholic' from 'alcoholic' which was never a combining form beforehand—would be a very lengthy historical process, but this is not true necessarily. Newer words like 'cyber' or 'blog' come from Internet abbreviations for 'cybernetics' and 'web-log', but now also affix to words like in 'cyberspace' or 'video-blog'. These were previously just words, but can now act as fairly productive combining forms.

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