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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2014-02-26 04:06:25

Dixon Wragg
Eggcornista
From: Cotati, California
Registered: 2008-07-04
Posts: 1375

"morphodite" for "hermaphrodite"

“Morphodite”, which dates back to at least the 1860s according to the Google Ngram viewer, is a colloquial mangling of “hermaphrodite”.

It’s not so good when one of them morphodite Chevy powered Stangs win.
car racing discussion

A morphodite is an individual or organism with both the female and male sex organs…Human morphodites can go for a medical surgery to have one of the sex organs removed.
Q & A site

I believe I have a morphodite goat. She has female organs but her bag and nipples and huge like she has had kids. But she has never had kids. She rares up like a billy and she smells like a billy. She bunts us all the time and just plain mean.
pet community discussion

It’s plausible that there’s an eggcornish meaning connection between “morphodite” and “hermaphrodite”, as the root “morph” refers to something having “a specified form or character”, as my dictionary (Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd edition) puts it, and hermaphroditism certainly has to do with form/characteristics. The question is: How many of the people who use the term “morphodite” are familiar with the root “morph”, as opposed to just using “morphodite” because it’s become a colloquial or regional substitution for “hermaphrodite”? Surely the recent popularization of “morph” as a verb referring to one computer graphic gradually changing into another increases the likelihood of an eggcornish meaning connection in recent instances of “morphodite”.

Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2014-02-26 04:17:16)

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