single word requests - crisscross, dillydally, riffraff, etc


Some English words only differ in their vowels: crisscross, dillydally, riffraff, etc. Is there a name for them?



Answer



Frozen reduplicative phrases like these, especially ones made of nonsense or phonosemantic roots like riffraff or hocus-pocus, are simply called Freezes in the literature, following Cooper and Ross 1975*, the first study to investigate them thoroughly.


Of course, freezes like hocus-pocus don't vary the vowels but the consonants. There is to my knowledge no fancy name for freezes that vary only their vowels.


Cooper and Ross* note that there are a number of reasons, some phonological and some semantic, that explain why one does not find reverse freezes like



*raffriff, *pocus-hocus, *crosscriss, *dallydilly





*William E. Cooper and John Robert Ross, 1975. "World Order" in Grossman, San, & Vance, eds. Papers from the Parasession on Functionalism, Chicago Linguistic Society.



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