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Cranberry morpheme

In linguistic morphology, a cranberry morpheme (or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned a meaning or a grammatical function but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other.

Etymology

The canonical example is the cran of cranberry. It is unrelated to the word cran meaning a case of herrings, and though it actually comes from crane (the bird), this is not immediately evident. Likewise, mul exists only in mulberry (mul is from Latin morus, the mulberry tree). Phonetically, the first morphemes of gooseberry and raspberry also count as cranberry morphemes, as they don't occur by themselves but the spelling gives a clue to their obscure origins. Compare these to blackberry, which has two obvious unbound morphemes. The first morphemes of loganberry and boysenberry are derived from names.

Examples

Cranberry morphemes in English include:

mit in permit, commit, and submit, from the Latin verb mittere meaning to give, to send
ceive in receive, perceive, and conceive, from the Latin verb capere meaning to seize
twi in twilight
spick and span in spick-and-span
fro in to and fro
cob in cobweb, from the obsolete word coppe for a spider
rasp in raspberry, from the obsolete word raspis for a raspberry

Emergence

Cranberry morphemes can arise in several ways:

A dialectal word can become part of the standard language in a compound, but not in its root, form: e.g. blatherskite, "one who talks nonsense", has Scots skite meaning "contemptible person".
A word can become obsolete in its root form but remain current in a compound: e.g. lukewarm from Middle English luke "tepid".
A compound loanword may have a recognisable native cognate for one element but not the other: e.g. hinterland is from German hinter "behind" and land "land".
A loanword may have one part misanalysed to a false cognate: e.g. a taffrail is a type of rail, but the word comes from Dutch tafereel "carved panel".