cutthroat compound

English

Examples
  • spoilsport (“one who spoils fun”)
  • breakwater (“something that diverts or breaks the force of water”)
  • scarecrow (“an effigy to scare crows”)
  • turncoat (“one who changes allegiance”)

Etymology

Coined by editor and linguist Brianne Hughes in 2015, as cutthroat is an example of the class of compound words. Compare cranberry morpheme, eggcorn, Hobson-Jobson, mondegreen.

Noun

cutthroat compound (plural cutthroat compounds)

  1. (linguistics) A compound word formed of a transitive verb and a noun; an (usually exocentric) agentive-instrumental verb-noun compound.
    Synonyms: cutthroat, (rare) turncoat compound
    • 2015 May 22, Stan Carey, “The Kick-butt World of Cutthroat Compounds”, in Slate Lexicon Valley‎[1]:
      Cutthroat compounds name things or people by describing what they do. A cutthroat cuts throats, a telltale tells tales, a wagtail wags its tail, a killjoy kills joy
    • [2015 May 31, D-AW [David-Antoine Williams], “Eggcorn makes it into Merriam-Webster”, in Language Log‎[2], archived from the original on 15 May 2024, comment:
      When did it become common for linguists describing a class of words to use a particular(ly good) example to refer to the class as a whole? (e.g. "eggcorn," "cutthroat compound" quite recently]
    • 2017 February 7, Brianne Hughes, “What are Cutthroat Compounds?”, in Encyclopedia Briannica‎[3], archived from the original on 1 October 2023:
      many early English cutthroat compounds were French loanwords, which were then translated and played with, creating variations and semantic clumps.
    • 2023 May 12, Andy Hollanbeck, “In a Word: Cutthroat Language”, in Saturday Evening Post‎[4]:
      There aren’t a lot of cutthroat compounds in common use these days — only about 30, depending on your definition of common. Probably the most well-used one is breakfast, that meal that breaks the fast begun (presumably) after dinner the previous night.

Usage notes

This pattern is a common way to form agent nouns in Romance languages, whereas it is not the usual way in Germanic languages (which use suffix -er or its homologues). The amount of use of this pattern in English shows the influence of the French language after the Norman conquest, and it is believed to reflect sociological factors: forming agent nouns in this way for despicable or derisible agents (such as cutthroat and turncoat) was apparently once a way for English people to mock both French people and fellow English people who spoke and acted too French.

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