unaffixed

Unaffixed is a linguistic term used to describe a word form that bears no affixes—no prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or circumfixes. In analyses of morphology, an unaffixed form is typically a free morpheme or stem that can function as a standalone word or as the unaltered base for further derivation or inflection. The term emphasizes the absence of attached morphemes rather than the lack of inherent meaning.

In practice, unaffixed forms often correspond to base or dictionary forms. For example, in English the word book is unaffixed in isolation, while its plural form books is affixed with the suffix -s, and its derived form bookish is affixed with -ish. Similarly, read is unaffixed in the base form but becomes affixed in reads, reading, or readable. The concept helps distinguish forms that are not carrying attached morphemes from those that are.

Unaffixed forms are more common in isolating or analytic languages, where words tend to have little or no inflectional or derivational morphology. In languages with rich affixation—agglutinative or fusional languages—the proportion of unaffixed forms varies by word class and grammatical context. Even within such languages, a base stem may be unaffixed before the addition of affixes, or certain lexemes may behave as unaffixed in particular constructions.

Etymology-wise, unaffixed is formed from un- and affixed, describing the state of lacking attachments. It is a descriptive category used in morphological descriptions and lexicon entries, rather than a formal grammatical class.

See also: affix, free morpheme, bound morpheme, infix, circumfix, derivational morphology, inflection.