Dictionary

cutthroat compound en · NOUN

Etymology

Coined by editor and linguist Brianne Hughes in the 2010s, as cutthroat is an example of the class of compound words. Compare cranberry morpheme, eggcorn, Hobson-Jobson, mondegreen.

Meanings

1. A compound word formed of a transitive verb and a noun; an (usually exocentric) agentive-instrumental verb-noun compound.
   • many early English cutthroat compounds were French loanwords, which were then translated and played with, creating variations and semantic clumps. 2017 February 7, Brianne Hughes, “What are Cutthroat Compounds?”, in Encyclopedia Briannica, archived from the original on 01 Oct 2023:
   • 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 22, Stan Carey, “The Kick-butt World of Cutthroat Compounds”, in Slate Lexicon Valley:
   • 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. 2023 May 12, Andy Hollanbeck, “In a Word: Cutthroat Language”, in Saturday Evening Post:
   • 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 [2015 May 31, D-AW [David-Antoine Williams], “Eggcorn makes it into Merriam-Webster”, in Language Log, archived from the original on 15 May 2024, comment:
   • But not for the compounds I study — the fun ones! — which are called agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun compounds. Now, for the rest of the talk I'm going to be calling them cutthroat compounds, so don't worry about that. [2013 November 14, Brianne Hughes, “Cutthroat Backstabbers: The Devious World of English Verb-Noun Compounding”, in YouTube, archived from the original on 16 May 2015:

Forms

Synonyms

cutthroat · turncoat compound