Word.ws English Dictionary

cutthroat compound

cutthroat compound noun: a compound word formed of a transitive verb and a noun; an (usually exocentric) agentive-instrumental verb-noun compound.

Noun

cutthroat compound (plural cutthroat compounds)

  1. A compound word formed of a transitive verb and a noun; an (usually exocentric) agentive-instrumental verb-noun compound.
    • 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
    • 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 joy2015 May 22, Stan Carey, “The Kick-butt World of Cutthroat Compounds”, in Slate Lexicon Valley
    Synonyms:
    cutthroat, turncoat compound

Examples of cutthroat compound in a sentence

  • "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...
  • 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:
  • There aren’t a lot of cutthroat compounds in common use these days — only about 30, depending on your definition of common.2023 May 12, Andy Hollanbeck, “In a Word: Cutthroat Language”, in Saturday Evening Post:

Synonyms of cutthroat compound

Forms of cutthroat compound

pluralcutthroat compounds

Origin of cutthroat compound

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.

Questions about cutthroat compound

What does cutthroat compound mean?
Cutthroat compound means a compound word formed of a transitive verb and a noun; an (usually exocentric) agentive-instrumental verb-noun compound.
How do you use cutthroat compound in a sentence?
"eggcorn," "cutthroat compound" quite recently
What part of speech is cutthroat compound?
Cutthroat compound is a noun.
What is the plural of cutthroat compound?
The plural of cutthroat compound is cutthroat compounds.

Words near cutthroat compound in the dictionary

  1. cutters-off
  2. Cuttery
  3. cuttest
  4. cutteth
  5. cutthroat
  6. cutthroat compound
  7. cutthroat compounds
  8. cutthroat eel
  9. cutthroat eels
  10. cutthroat razor
  11. cutthroat trout

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cutthroat compound (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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