Origin: Greek suffix -ology
Morphology has 6 different meanings across 1 category:
the branch of biology that deals with the structure of animals and plants
"The students spent their lab period studying morphology to observe how different species of beetles are adapted for burrowing underground."
studies of the rules for forming admissible words
"As a linguistics student, I spent my afternoon analyzing English morphology to understand exactly how prefixes and suffixes combine to create valid new words."
the admissible arrangement of sounds in words
"The linguist spent her morning analyzing how vowel harmony shapes the morphology of Turkish loanwords in modern Spanish slang."
the branch of geology that studies the characteristics and configuration and evolution of rocks and land forms
"The professor's lecture on morphology focused entirely on how ancient river systems carved their deep canyons over millions of years."
A scientific study of form and structure, usually without regard to function. Especially:
"The linguist spent her morning analyzing the morphology of ancient Greek verbs to understand how their internal structures changed over time."
The study of the internal structure of morphemes (words and their semantic building blocks).
"The linguist spent her afternoon analyzing morphology to understand how prefixes and roots combine to create new meanings within English words."
The word morphology comes from German and combines the prefix morpho- with the suffix -logy. It originally referred to the study of forms or shapes.