The -Ex Ending in Product Names

T HE ENDING -ex, which is common in English and international product names, is not a suffix in the usual sense (for reasons which will become clear), but its productivity seems to be established beyond doubt by the large number of names of products which can be found in any chemist's shop, drug store, supermarket, and many other types of shop: for example, Kleenex, Sinex, Earex, Coldrex, Amplex, Kynex, Vallex, Volex, Butrex, Aminex, Andrex, Spontex, Biotex, Yeastex, Amplex, Playtex, Copydex, Perspex. The frequency of the -ex ending in modern product and trade names makes it, in my view, a legitimate object of study for morphologists and lexicologists. However, it is rather different from the other formal objects which are normally studied in this field, in the following ways at least: 1. It is unlike the usual type of derivational morpheme, because it neither carries an isolable referential meaning nor brings about a category change. In fact it may be suffixed to items which are not lexical items at all (see (2)). 2. It must be treated as a bound form, but it is often bound to items which are not words of English, nor even clipped forms of English words. Thus, Dexcafex < dextrose + caffeine + -ex involves a blend of two English words, meaningless in itself, plus -ex. 3. For the same reason, it does not correspond to a final combining form (Bauer 1983, 213) like -naut or -crat, since these are limited to combining with an Initial Combining Form which must end in o (or occasionally another vowel). Since the existence of the -ex ending has apparently almost escaped the attention of linguists so far, a good deal of work remains to be done: this is only a preliminary report. In this paper I will discuss the history, productivity, and semantics of -ex and make some remarks on its phonology

Product (mathematics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Mathematics · History

• Englishization of business names in Brazil

  Open Access•Terese Thonus•World Englishes•1991

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