: a minimum grammatical feature of selection (as the occurrence of the noun actor before -ess in actress), of order (as the fact that actr- precedes -ess in actress), of stress (as the occurrence of one main stress on the first syllable in actress), of pitch (as the interrogative final pitch when Actress? is an entire utterance constituting a question), or of phonetic modification (as the change of actor to actr- before -ess)
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Merriam-Webster unabridged
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