Libfix

Splinters were defined by Berman in 1961 as non-morphemic word fragments. This includes not just libfixes, but also word fragments which become words, like burger (< hamburger), flu (< influenza), and net (< network).[4][5][6]

The name libfix was coined by Arnold Zwicky in 2010 as a blend of "liberated" and "affix" specifically for splinters used as productive morphemes.[7]

Some of these formations have been considered barbarisms by prescriptive writers on style,[8] though other writers have praised them. Speaking of the -tron suffix, a philologist commented:

I once heard an unkind critic allude disparagingly to these neologisms as dog-Greek. To a lover of the language of Sophocles and Plato these recent coinages may indeed appear to be Greek debased. More appropriately, perhaps, they might be termed lion-Greek or chameleon-Greek. They are Neo-Hellenic in the genuine Renaissance tradition.[9]

Each example gives the affix, the source word(s) from which it was formed, the meaning, and examples.

This list does not include:

• affixes based on English words like tech or burger used literally, even if they are shortened forms, in this case, for technology and hamburger;
• affixes which are aligned in form and meaning with their etymological source, like -(o)cracy or -orama in cyclorama and diorama from ὅραμα 'spectacle'; motorama is a portmanteau of motor and orama, not a compound of mot- and -orama;
• words which have been separated from phrases, e.g. fu from kung fu.

• Bernard Fradin, "Combining forms, blends, and related phenomena", in Ursula Doleschal, Anna M. Thornton, eds., Extragrammatical and Marginal Morphology, LINCOM studies in theoretical linguistics 12 (2000), ISBN 3895865907, papers from a workshop in Vienna, 1996, p. 11-59 full text
• Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin, 1922, 19:13-15
• Muriel Norde, Sara Sippach, "Nerdalicious scientainment: A network analysis of English libfixes", Word Structure 12:3:353-384 doi:10.3366/word.2019.0153.
• Yuval Pinter, Cassandra L. Jacobs, Max Bittker. "NYTWIT: A Dataset of Novel Words in the New York Times", Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Barcelona), p. 6509–6515, December 8–13, 2020. full text
• Neal Whitman, "A linguistic tour of the best libfixes, from -ana to -zilla, The Week, September 17, 2013.
• Arnold Zwicky, "Playing with your Morphology", Language Log, August 28, 2006