comparative morphology
nounComparative morphology is the study of how the body parts of different living things are alike and different.
By studying comparative morphology, scientists learned that a bat's wing and a human's arm are built from the same kinds of bones.
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OTHER MEANINGS
2. In linguistics, the study of how different languages form and change words.
Her paper on comparative morphology compared how English and German build plurals.
3. The branch of biology that compares the shapes and structures of organisms to understand their relationships.
Comparative morphology helped place the newly found fossil on the family tree.
4. A method of comparing word forms across languages to trace their shared history.
Using comparative morphology, the team showed that the two dialects share a common root.