cutthroat compound

Coined by editor and linguist Brianne Hughes in the 2010s, as cutthroat is an example of the class of compound words. Compare cranberry morpheme, eggcorn, Hobson-Jobson, mondegreen.

cutthroat compound (plural cutthroat compounds)

1. (linguistics) A compound word formed of a transitive verb and a noun; an (usually exocentric) agentive-instrumental verb-noun compound.

   Synonyms: cutthroat, (rare) turncoat compound

   • [2013 November 14, Brianne Hughes, “Cutthroat Backstabbers: The Devious World of English Verb-Noun Compounding”, in YouTube‎^[1], archived from the original on 16 May 2015:

     But not for the compounds I study — the fun ones! — which are called agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun compounds. Now, for the rest of the talk I'm going to be calling them cutthroat compounds, so don't worry about that.]

   • 2015 May 22, Stan Carey, “The Kick-butt World of Cutthroat Compounds”, in Slate Lexicon Valley‎^[2]:

     Cutthroat compounds name things or people by describing what they do. A cutthroat cuts throats, a telltale tells tales, a wagtail wags its tail, a killjoy kills joy

   • [2015 May 31, D-AW [David-Antoine Williams], “Eggcorn makes it into Merriam-Webster”, in Language Log‎^[3], archived from the original on 15 May 2024, comment:

     When did it become common for linguists describing a class of words to use a particular(ly good) example to refer to the class as a whole? (e.g. "eggcorn," "cutthroat compound" quite recently]

   • 2017 February 7, Brianne Hughes, “What are Cutthroat Compounds?”, in Encyclopedia Briannica‎^[4], archived from the original on 1 October 2023:

     many early English cutthroat compounds were French loanwords, which were then translated and played with, creating variations and semantic clumps.

   • 2023 May 12, Andy Hollanbeck, “In a Word: Cutthroat Language”, in Saturday Evening Post‎^[5]:

     There aren’t a lot of cutthroat compounds in common use these days — only about 30, depending on your definition of common. Probably the most well-used one is breakfast, that meal that breaks the fast begun (presumably) after dinner the previous night.

This pattern is a common way to form agent nouns in Romance languages, whereas it is not the usual way in Germanic languages (which use suffix -er or its homologues). The amount of use of this pattern in English shows the influence of the French language after the Norman conquest, and it is believed to reflect sociological factors: forming agent nouns in this way for despicable or derisible agents (such as cutthroat and turncoat) was apparently once a way for English people to mock both French people and fellow English people who spoke and acted too French.