infix

verb

1. (archaic, transitive)To set; to fasten or fix by piercing or thrusting in.

   “to infix a sting, spear, or dart”

   “[…] in her eye I find A wonder, or a wondrous miracle, The shadow of myself form’d in her eye: Which being but the shadow of your son, Becomes a sun and makes your son a shadow: I do protest I never loved myself Till now infixed I beheld myself Drawn in the flattering table of her eye.”

   “The fatal Dart a ready Passage found, And deep within his Heart infix’d the Wound:”

   “Consider that innumerable race of insects, which either are bred on the body of each animal, or flying about infix their stings in him.”

   “Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.”

2. (transitive)To instill.
3. (transitive)To insert a morpheme inside an existing word.

noun

1. An affix inserted inside a root, such as -ma- in English edumacation.

   “I am not pleased with one or two of the noun cases (they are too similar to others) and I want to change the way that the Focus category (see Section 3.5 of the grammar) is manifested (using word-order instead of an infix or other phonological marker). All in all, the language is structured almost exactly as I wanted.”

2. A prefix that is not at the beginning of a word, such as the con- of reconcile, or a suffix that is not at the end of a word, such as the -al of nationality.

   “The infix position contains (pronominal) object markers, showing agreement with the object(s), which might be one or more noun phrases following the verb, or a foregoing or previously mentioned object marking.”

   “[…] but the second example contravenes all the rules, as the negative infix should NEVER precede any Set 2 affix present in the complex.”

   “[…] at least in languages, like Swahili, which exhibit morphologically different tense/aspect infixes in affirmative and negative clauses[…]”

   “The morpheme in question is the reflexive prefix ('infix' in the traditional Bantu terminology).”

3. (dated)A prefix that always occurs in the position immediately before the verb root, and which may in turn be preceded by other prefixes.
4. (proscribed)Synonym of interfix.