Home › Glossary › Letter P

Prefix

Grammar
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A morpheme added to the beginning of a word to alter its meaning

Detailed Definition
A prefix in poetry is a morpheme added to the beginning of a word to alter its meaning, tone, or connotation—e.g., “un-,” “re-,” “dis-”—and poets strategically deploy prefixes to create nuance, irony, or semantic tension; beyond grammatical function, prefixes can signal reversal, repetition, or negation that shapes the poem’s emotional or philosophical stance.
Example
Example in poetry:
A morpheme added at the beginning of a word to change its meaning or part of speech, often used by poets for coinage or emphasis: unseen, rewrite, exhale; The creation of neologisms by adding unusual prefixes: pre-dawn, non-sense, hyper-active; Using the prefix fore- to indicate a sense of prophecy or futurity: fore-know, fore-told; Gerard Manley Hopkins' coinage of words using compounded prefixes and suffixes.
Additional Notes
Prefix: A morpheme (word part) added to the beginning of a word to modify its meaning (e.g., un- in unseen); poets use prefixes to create neologisms or to subtly shift the tone or meaning of a word.
Also Known As
Word-beginning affix stem starter opening morpheme
Skip to main content