Word.ws English Dictionary

Lyman's law

Lyman's law proper noun: a linguistic rule stating that rendaku does not occur if the second element of the compound contains a voiced obstruent in any position, e.g. yama + kaji produces yamakaji (mountain fire), not *yamagaji.

Proper noun

Lyman's law

  1. A linguistic rule stating that rendaku does not occur if the second element of the compound contains a voiced obstruent in any position, e.g. yama + kaji produces yamakaji (mountain fire), not *yamagaji.

Origin of Lyman's law

After Benjamin Smith Lyman (1835–1920), American mining engineer and amateur linguist.

Questions about Lyman's law

What does Lyman's law mean?
Lyman's law means a linguistic rule stating that rendaku does not occur if the second element of the compound contains a voiced obstruent in any position, e.g. yama + kaji produces yamakaji (mountain fire), not *yamagaji.
What part of speech is Lyman's law?
Lyman's law is a proper noun.

Words near Lyman's law in the dictionary

  1. Lylian
  2. Lylyan
  3. Lyman
  4. Lyman County
  5. Lyman series
  6. Lyman's law
  7. Lyman-alpha forest
  8. lymantria
  9. lymantrid
  10. lymantrids
  11. lymantriid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Lyman's law (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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