Three letter rule poets such as John Milton alternated between short and long forms for function words, depending on whether they occurred on or off the meter. For instance: While many function words have more than two letters ("and", "she", "were", "therefore", etc.), the exceptions to the rule are rather two-letter content words. Only a few of these occur commonly in most texts: the words "go" (which also has a functional usage in the idiom "going to do something"), "ox" and, especially in American texts, "ax". English grammar is relatively flexible about converting words of one class to another, allowing verbal uses such
Word formation Word formation In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define: a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form. See 'conversion'. There are a number of methods of word formation. A blend is a word formed by joining parts of two words after clipping. An example is "smog", which comes from