English 101

Question: Which of these is a morpheme?

Answer: Eat is a morpheme—it can’t be broken down into anything smaller with meaning. The other words contain additions to the root "eat."

Question: How many morphemes are in the word "eaters"?

Answer: Eat is a morpheme. So is –er, meaning “someone who." A third morpheme is –s, meaning "more than one."

Question: Which of these is a homophone for "bear"?

Answer: Bare and bear are homophones, meaning words that are pronounced alike.

Question: Which of these is not to be taken literally?

Answer: An idiom doesn’t mean what its individual words mean. In Italian, "in the mouth of the wolf" is an idiom. It means "good luck." And "kick the bucket" in English has nothing to do with buckets.

Question: What is the term for words that sound like themselves, such as "ding dong" and "purr"?

Answer: Onomatopoeia refers to words that sound like the thing itself, such as "purr." The term, in Greek, means "it makes its own name."

Question: By definition, how many languages can a monolingual person speak?

Answer: A monolingual person speaks just one language, while a bilingual person speaks two.

Question: Which prefix means "distant"?

Answer: Tele comes from the Greek "telos," which means "distant." For example, "telephone" comes from the Greek words meaning "distant voice."

Question: What is the name of an overused expression?

Answer: A cliché is an expression that loses its punch through overuse.

Question: Which suffix means "the quality or state of"?

Answer: The suffix –ence refers to the quality or state of something. Independence, for example, means the state of not being dependent on someone.

Question: Which of these is not a part of speech?

Answer: An interrogation is a question. It is not a part of speech, grammatically speaking.