ABSTRACT
Phobia is a word on its own in English, meaning ‘fear or hatred, especially an extreme or irrational one’, but it comes from the Greek word meaning ‘fear’ with a suffix -ia, meaning ‘a pathological condition’. The element xeno- comes from a Greek word meaning ‘strange, foreign’, and xenophobia is a fear of foreigners. The element xen- can also be found in the word xenon ‘a gas’, and can be added to English words, as in xenotransplant ‘transplant from a different species’. Often hydro- is used as a prefix on an ordinary word: hydrocellulose, hydrodynamic, and hydrosphere. The chapter explores two patterns: compounds derived from Greek elements and prefixed verbs from Latin. The compounds that are to be dealt are called ‘neo-classical’ compounds in the literature. Although there are some compounds which follow a Latin pattern.
