Noncompositional

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Alternative form of non-compositional. alt-of, alternative, not-comparable

    "To cite a textbook example, white house and White House are both written with internal spaces, but the first is argued to be a phrase because it is semantically compositional and has phrase-final stress, while the latter is argued to be a word because it has noncompositional semantics and compound-initial stress."

Example

More examples

"To cite a textbook example, white house and White House are both written with internal spaces, but the first is argued to be a phrase because it is semantically compositional and has phrase-final stress, while the latter is argued to be a word because it has noncompositional semantics and compound-initial stress."

Etymology

From non- + compositional.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.