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-oid
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-oid is a suffix much used in the sciences and mathematics to indicate a "similarity, not necessarily exact, to something else". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, -oid is derived from the Latin suffix -oides taken from Greek and meaning "having the likeness of". Thus, asteroid means "like a star" and rhomboid means "like a rhombus". There are many examples of such words: android, anthropoid, factoid, humanoid, planetoid, trapezoid and so forth. Because -oid denotes similarity, not necessarily exact, but can also denote exactness, in chemistry the suffix refers to a very large class of related compounds, natural and/or synthetic. Examples include steroid (of which sterols are just one smaller group) and alkaloid. When nouns formed using -oid are turned into adjectives, the suffix usually becomes -oidal. |
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