A bahuvrihi (बहुवृहि), or bahuvrihi compound, is a particular kind of compound word that refers to something that is not specified by any of its parts by themselves (i.e., it is headless), especially a compound that refers to a possessor of an object specified: a bahuvrihi compound XY tends to mean someone or something which has a Y, and that Y has the characteristic X. For instance, a sabertooth is neither a saber nor a tooth: it is a smilodon, an extinct feline with saber-like fangs. Often, but not always, the last constituent in a bahuvrihi is a noun, and the whole compound is an adjective. English bahuvrihis often refer pejoratively to properties of human beings. A compound is a word (lexeme) that consists of more than one free morpheme. ... In linguistics, the head is the main part of a compound or phrase. ... Sabretooth (Victor Creed) is a comic book supervillain in the Marvel Comics universe, and an arch-enemy of Wolverine. ... The Saber (spanish/portuguese: knowledge) currency is an educational sectoral currency in Brazil that is handed out by the ministry of education. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Species Smilodon (Greek: Knife-Tooth) is an extinct genus of large machairodontine saber-toothed cats that are understood to have lived between approximately 3 million to 10,000 years ago in North and South America. ... Look up pejorative in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The term "bahuvrihi" was first used by Sanskrit grammarians, and is a specific Sanskrit example: a compound consisting of bahu ("much") and vrihi ("rice") and meaning a rich person, a person who owns much rice. Sanskrit ( संस्कृतम् ; pronunciation: ) is an Indo-European classical language of India and a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. ... Species Oryza glaberrima Oryza sativa Rice refers to two species (Oryza sativa and Oryza glaberrima) of grass, native to tropical and subtropical southeastern Asia and to Africa, which together provide more than one fifth of the calories consumed by humans[1]. Rice is an annual plant, growing to 1-1. ...

Other examples of English bahuvrihis are "flatfoot", "half-wit", "highbrow", "lowlife", "redhead", "tenderfoot", "longlegs", and "white-collar".

A bahuvrihi is a type of exocentric compound, since its core semantic value is subsumed by an elliptical or `external' semantic value. Thus, the compound is not a hyponym of the head (e.g. "dinnertable" is not a bahuvrihi because it a kind of table and "table" is the head of the compound). This page is a candidate to be moved to Wiktionary. ... A hyponym (in Greek: υπονύμιον, literally meaning few names) is a word whose extension is included within that of another word. ...

See also

• Sanskrit compounds