to contracept

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:52 AM -0800 11/28/10, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>On Nov 28, 2010, at 7:10 AM, Paul Frank wrote:
>>
>>
>>  Nothing unremarkable, since all sorts of nouns can and are turned into
>>  verbs. But just for the record, the verb "to contracept" is not in the
>>  OED. The string "to contracept" yields  6,040 Google results. I'd
>>  never seen it before today...
>
>for the record, this is not simple verbing, but back-formation of a
>verb from "contraception"/"contraceptive". so is Larry Horn's
>waggish suggestion "contraceive", but that involves reconstructing a
>stem in -ceive.
>
>arnolda
>
Indeed.  One of the ("about1,050") raw g-hits for _contraceive_ is
from a List of English Back-formations at FindTarget.com, which
includes

contracept from contraception (cf. rare contraceive)

LH

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