Morphology

In linguistics, morphology is the study of the form of words. In science (most particularly biology) it means the study of the form or structure of phenomena. Morphological biology studies the form and structure of living things, such as how bacteria are structured. Linguistically, morphology refers to the how words are structured and concerns itself with elements that act as building blocks for words. For example, linguistic morphology is interested in how "asks" differs from "asked" to indicated a specific sense of time based out of the root "ask." It comes from the Greek morphe--"form" combined with the suffix -ology--the study of a particular subject.