Clipping

Clipping is a means of creating new words by shortening already existing words. For example, we have info created from information, blog created from web log, or fridge from refrigerator. Universities are fertile grounds for the creation of clippings: students study psych, anthro, soc, and even ling with one prof or another, and if they’re taking a science class, may spend long hours in the lab, which might or might not involve running some stats. Although clippings are often used in a colloquial rather than a formal register, some have attained more neutral status. The word lab, for example, is probably used far more frequently in the US than its longer version laboratory. The word mob is a seventeenth-century clipping from the Latin term mobile vulgus ‘the fickle common people’; the Latin phrase has long been forgotten, but the clipping persists as the normal word for an unruly throng of people.