Binom

Origin

- + bi + -

Full definition of binom

Noun

1. (linguistics) A compound word.
• 2004 , Samuel Elmo Martin , A Reference Grammar of Japanese , The latter, somewhat stiffer, version appears to enjoy particular favor when the AN is a binom of Chinese origin modifying another Chinese binom and the two words are either optionally combinable into a compound noun (by dropping the copula nó/ná together with its juncture and applying the proper examples where ná is replaced by nó under other circumstances, such as those given earlier for -teki and the following examples:
• 2013 , P. Kümmel , Formalization of Natural Languages , It a meaning is expressed in a particular language like English with the help of a binom, newspaper, and in another particular language like German by a mononom Zeitung, the heteronomic morphology is usually more voluminous (9 phongrams against 7).
• 2015 , Haruo Kubozono , Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology , The prototypical Sino-Japanese word is a binom, that is, a word written with two kanji, each kanji representing a Sino-Japanese morph. It is not difficult to find examples of rendaku affecting Singo-Japanese binoms, and a few are listed in (23).

Usage notes

This term is used primarily by linguists studying Asian languages, where the kanji representation of the word is constructed from the kanji representations of the two constituent parts.