English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the word classes or the semantic relationship of their components.
English inherits the ability to form compounds from its parent the Proto-Indo-European language and expands on it.
[2] Close to two-thirds of the words in the Old English poem Beowulf are found to be compounds.
English uses many open compound nouns, a large subclass of which, by convention in accepted English orthography, are not closed up (not solidified) and are sometimes optionally hyphenated in attributive position (that is, when functioning as a noun adjunct).
This pattern holds for countless nouns with few exceptions; notice that the latter pair involve multisyllabic heads.
For the class with monosyllabic heads, there is a tendency that "compounds tend to solidify as they age,"[5]: 368 which is how a term such as data set becomes dataset, pin-up becomes pinup,[5]: 368 coal mine becomes coalmine, bottle cap becomes bottlecap, and so on.
Such alternative forms usually continue to coexist in accepted use; style guides often convene on preferred dictionaries as a way of achieving consistency, by declaring that the headword form there will be the default styling for each such term.
[a] However, this is obscured by the fact that the written representation of long compounds always contains spaces.
In addition to this native English compounding, there is the neo-classical type, which consists of words derived from Classical Latin, as horticulture, and those of Ancient Greek origin, such as photography, the components of which are in bound form (connected by connecting vowels, which are most often -i- and -o- in Classical Latin and Ancient Greek respectively) and cannot stand alone.
A people-carrier is a clear endocentric determinative compound: it is a thing that is a carrier of people.
The related adjective, car-carrying, is also endocentric: it refers to an object which is a carrying-thing (or equivalently, which does carry).
Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, is the combined area of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but a fighter-bomber is an aircraft that is both a fighter and a bomber.
Iterative or amredita compounds repeat a single element, to express repetition or as an emphasis.
The ladybird or ladybug was named after the Christian expression "our Lady, the Virgin Mary".
In playboy, for example, the noun is the subject of the verb (the boy plays), whereas it is the object in callgirl (someone calls the girl).
Blackboard Jungle, leftover ingredients, gunmetal sheen, and green monkey disease are only a few examples.
There are some well-established permanent compound modifiers that have become solid over a longer period, especially in American usage: earsplitting, eyecatching, and downtown.
The term compound verb was first used in publication in Grattan and Gurrey's Our Living Language (1925).
Specifically, the first three sentences render held up as a phrasal verb that expresses an idiomatic, figurative, or metaphorical sense that depends on the contextual meaning of the particle, "up."