Exaeresis

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The omission of a letter or syllable from within a word in speech or writing ; the surgical cutting out of a diseased or damaged part of the body
2. Deletion of a sound or syllable from a word, as in linguistic change ; the medical removal of tissue by cutting it away from the body
3. Removing a letter or syllable from a word during pronunciation or spelling ; excising a portion of diseased or unwanted tissue through surgery

Etymology: "Exaeresis" is the term for the loss of a sound from within a word, a relative of "synaeresis" and its opposite-minded cousins in the family of sound-change terms. Its root is the Ancient Greek noun "exairesis," built from "ek," meaning "out," and "hairein," meaning "to take," so the literal sense is "a taking out" or "an extraction." Grammarians of the Greek tradition used the same stem for the removal of letters, and the word passed into modern scholarly Latin, where it was given the specific sense of a sound dropping out of a word. English took the term from that New Latin form, so it is a technical coinage in the scholarly vocabulary of linguistics and phonology rather than an everyday word. Its meaning stayed close to the original idea of taking something out: where the Greek sense was a physical removal, the modern sense is the removal of a sound, most often a vowel or syllable, from a word's pronunciation.

Synonyms: excision, removal, resection