noun, plural ferries. 1. a commercial service with terminals and boats for transporting persons, automobiles, etc., across a river or other comparatively small body of water. 2. a ferryboat.
Examples and related terms. A loanword is distinguished from a calque (loan translation), which is a word or phrase whose meaning or idiom is adopted from another language by translation into existing words or word-forming roots of the recipient language.
A root, as its name suggests, is a word or word part from which other words grow, usually through the addition of prefixes and suffixes. The root of the word vocabulary, for example, is voc, a Latin root meaning word or name.. This root also appears in the words advocacy, convocation, evocative, vocal, and vociferous. Understanding the meanings of the common word roots can help us deduce the meanings of new words that we encounter.