What are Compound Words? (150+ Compound Words)

November 21, 2023

Dalia Y

Started Grammarflex(ing) in 2022—been a word nerd and writing enthusiast ever since. (BA, MA in phil).

Contents

What are compound words?

Playground, dining room, sister-in-law.

What do these words have in common, if anything at all? If you guessed that they’re all compound words, then you are absolutely 100% correct! Compound words are not complicated: they’re just words that have been mashed together to form an entirely new word altogether, with a different meaning than either of the words in isolation.

The word pancake, for example, is a compound word that is made up of the two individual words, pan and cake. We know that the words pan and cake have their own distinct meanings, but when they’re combined, they form a new word with its own distinct meaning (which is a pancake).

A panacke, which is a compound word. — A *pancake*, which is a compound word with *pan* + *cake*.

The word compound originally comes from the Latin word componere, “to put together”, which is precisely what compound words are. The word compound can also be an adjective to describe something that consists of two or more parts or components.

Types of compound words

Compound words come in three main forms: closed, open, and hyphenated.

Closed compounds

Closed compounds are usually nouns, and do not use a space between both words. Some familiar examples of closed compounds are:

Chick + pea = chickpea
Sun + flower = sunflower
Lip + stick = lipstick

Part of speech	Closed compounds
Noun	backpack, boyfriend, breakfast, bypass, checkout, cheesecake, highway, login, newborn, payout, peanut, smartphone, weekend, wherewithal
Pronoun	anyone, everything, nobody, oneself, themselves
Verbs	babysit, breakfast, bypass, cannot, snowball
Adjective	everyday, heartbreaking, nearby, newborn, shamefaced, spellbinding
Adverb	anymore, anyway, awhile, elsewhere, hereby, however, maybe, moreover, nevertheless, nowadays, spellbindingly
Preposition	insofar, into, throughout, upon, within
Conjunction	whenever, whereas

Open compounds

Open compounds include a space between the pair of words that act as a single “word” or unit; they’re always used together, and in the same order. Many open compounds are nouns, but as you’ll see from the chart below, they can also be verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, and so on.

When open compound are verbs are made up of verbs, these are called phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs follow their own rules, but generally speaking, only one of the words in the group is conjugated while the others remain the same.

Part of speech	Open compounds
Noun	artificial intelligence, house party, living room, roller coaster, search engine, test drive, theme park, walking stick attorney general, common sense, French fries, high school
Pronoun	each other, no one, one another
Verbs	check in, figure out, go ahead, hold off, kick off, log in, pass by, used to
Adverb	after all, en route, next to, with feeling
Preposition	as far as, close by, such as, next to, with regard to
Conjunction	as far as, in that

Hyphenated compounds

Hyphenated compounds, as you may have guessed, use a hyphen to join the two or more words to create a compound. For the most part, they’re formed from adjectives or adverb-adjective combinations. Some examples of hyphenated compounds are:

Merry-go-round
Over-the-counter
Mother-in-law

Part of speech	Hyphenated compounds
Noun	check-in, go-ahead, kick-off, know-it-all, man-of-war, merry-go-round, run-in, runner-up, sister-in-law, well-being
Verbs	strong-arm, test-drive
Adjective	empty-handed, full-fledged, lightning-fast, long-term, mind-blowing, off-duty, over-the-counter, roller-coaster, run-of-the-mill, up-to-date, walk-in
Adverb	lightning-fast, mind-blowingly, red-handed

Compounds vs. portmanteaus

A portmanteau (also called a blend) is a word that’s formed by merging two independent words together. An example is the word smog: smog is a blend of two individual words, i.e., smoke + fog.

Portmanteaus are different from closed compounds because at least one of the words that form the portmanteau is not used in its complete form: some letters have been omitted or moved. Compound words, by contrast, use the entire form of the individual words that they’re formed from. Other examples of portmanteaus include: