cranberry morpheme

In GRAMMAR, a term referring to a BOUND MORPHEME which has no clear MEANING or grammatical FUNCTION, but which none the less distinguishes one WORD from another. The classic example is the first element of cranberry, where cran- has no other function in English than to differentiate this word from blackberry, blueberry, etc. Sometimes several items present the same kind of difficulty for morphological theory, as in the group of words ending in -ceive (receive, deceive, etc.).