cranberry words

Noun

cranberry word (plural cranberry words)

1. A word used only in certain fixed phrases or idioms, with a meaning that is otherwise opaque; often a fossil word.
   • Likewise, cranberry words like the underlined words in hediye jawa ‘to be bored to death’ and keMce jawa ‘to go wrong (said of plans)’ were cited by P. Dasgupta (1980: 99–101) as evidence for a base-generated V V analysis of the compound verb construction.2012, Probal Dasgupta, “Rephrasing the question of complex predicates in Bangla: A biaxial approach”, in Rajendra Singh, Shishir Bhattacharja, editors, Annual Review of South Asian Languages and...
2. A word that contains a cranberry morpheme.
   • (13d) exhibits the same suffix as the two adjectives that precede it in the list, though the root is otherwise unattested; it is a Greek “cranberry word.”2013, Don Ringe, Joseph F. Eska, Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration, →ISBN, page 118