In linguistics, describing a phrase or compound word that doesn't belong to the same grammatical category as its constituent parts.
From 'exo-' (outside) and 'centric' (from 'centrum,' meaning center), coined in the early 20th century by linguists studying how word combinations work grammatically and semantically.
The word 'blackbird' is exocentric—even though 'black' and 'bird' are adjective and noun, 'blackbird' as a whole refers to a specific type of bird, not to something that is both black and a bird!
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