What (who) is -oid - definition

AFFIX WHICH IS PLACED AFTER THE STEM OF A WORD

Suffix morpheme; Suffixes; Suffixation; Desinence; Ending (linguistics); Suffix (linguistics); -able and -ible; -able; -ible; English suffix; Afformative; Word ending; Postfix (linguistics); Suffixes in English; Suffix in English; Derivational suffix; -oid; Inflectional suffix; Grammatical suffix; Suffixoid; Semi-suffix; -ness

-oid

¦ suffix forming adjectives and nouns:

1. Zoology denoting an animal belonging to a higher taxon with a name ending in -oidea: hominoid.

2. denoting form or resemblance: asteroid.

Derivatives

-oidal suffix.

-oidally suffix.

Origin

from mod. L. -oides, from Gk -oeides; related to eidos 'form'.

-oid

<jargon> (from "android") A suffix used as in mainstream English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that wouldn't keep company with it in mainstream English. For example, "He's a nerdoid" means that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; a "modemoid" might be a 300-baud modem (Real Modems run at 144000 or up); a "computeroid" might be any bitty box. "-oid" can also mean "resembling an android", which was once confined to science-fiction fans and hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in the term "trendoid" for victims of terminal hipness). This is probably traceable to the popularisation of the term droid in "Star Wars" and its sequels. Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have probably been making "-oid" jargon for almost that long (though GLS and ESR can personally confirm only that they were already common in the mid-1970s). [Jargon File] (1999-07-10)

-oid

·- A suffix or combining form meaning like, resembling, in the form of; as in anthropoid, asteroid, spheroid.

Wikipedia

Suffix

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry grammatical information (inflectional suffixes) or lexical information (derivational/lexical suffixes). An inflectional suffix or a grammatical suffix. Such inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. For derivational suffixes, they can be divided into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation.

Particularly in the study of Semitic languages, suffixes are called affirmatives, as they can alter the form of the words. In Indo-European studies, a distinction is made between suffixes and endings (see Proto-Indo-European root). Suffixes can carry grammatical information or lexical information.

A word-final segment that is somewhere between a free morpheme and a bound morpheme is known as a suffixoid or a semi-suffix (e.g., English -like or German -freundlich "friendly").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix

Pronunciation examples for -oid