combining form

Noun

combining form (plural combining forms)

1. A type of word part; a bound morpheme; used in combination with a word, a different combining form, or an affix to form a new word.
   • Common in English, where in some putative compounds, such as autocrat or technocrat, both members would be combining forms.2007, P. H. Matthews, “combining form”, in The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics, 2nd edition, Oxford [u.a.]: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, pages 63–64
2. A character encoded with a sequence of other characters instead of a precomposed character.
   • As far as possible this specification uses non-combining characters, however, in the cases tdot, TripleDot and DotDot Unicode only has combining forms of the accents, and so the entity replacement text starts with a space, to avoid the possibility that the expansion of the entity combines with...2014 April 10, “XML Entity Definitions for Characters (2nd Edition)”, in David Carlisle, Patrick Ion, editors, w3.org, World Wide Web Consortium, retrieved 22 Mar 2015