morphology

Morphology is the study of form and structure. Most often, people use it in linguistics and biology.

In linguistics, morphology is the branch of language study that looks at the internal structure of words and how words are formed. It focuses on morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in a language. These are not always whole words. They can be prefixes like "re-," suffixes like "-ing," or roots like "port" in "transport" and "portable." If you understand this structure, you can often guess the meaning of unfamiliar words more easily.

For example, the word "unbreakable" can be divided into "un-" + "break" + "-able." Looking at those parts shows how the meaning is built. Linguists also talk about derivational morphology, where parts change a word's meaning or word class, and inflectional morphology, where endings show grammar like tense, number, or comparison.

In biology, morphology means the form and structure of living things or their parts. A scientist might compare the morphology of birds' wings, flowers' petals, or animals' teeth to understand how species differ, how they function, or how they may be related. In this broader sense, the word is about shape, arrangement, and physical features.

So whether the topic is words or organisms, morphology is about how something is put together and what its structure can tell us.