derivation

a linguistic process whereby one word may be related historically or in a conscious way to another word; in English there are a number of sufixes that allow a verb to act as a noun, or adjective, or adverb, etc., e.g., to love, love, lovable, lovably or to be kind, kindness, kind, kindly; with personal names this kind of d. is called adaptation and explains a good deal of the variety in the spelling and use of given names as once surnames, or surnames as having been given names, titles, domain names, clan names, family names. etc.; cf. Chapter 3, §3