1888: costard and costermonger Feb 15, 2020

Normally, when people talk about combining forms, they simply refer to endings which add meaning but don't change the classification of the word. This description can be made of '-monger' in words like 'fishmonger' or 'cheesemonger', since '-monger' cannot exist on its own, but in the case of 'costermonger', the root word also changes, albeit not grammatically. A costermonger is an apple-salesman (not the Steve Jobs kind) named for the type of apple 'costard', which itself comes from the '-ard' suffix on a meaningless stem 'cost-'.