Find me a "ster"

Yesterday, while browsing a Jewish cultural site, SC noticed an ad for a website called "Frumster" ("frum" is a Yiddish word meaning a very religious person). The site bills itself as "the dating service exclusively for Orthodox Jewish singles worldwide" (emphasis in original).

The name Frumster is just one more in a series of "-ster"s beginning with the original, Napster. There are plenty of others, including Grokster and Friendster. Thanks to Napster and those who have followed in its path, "-ster" looks like it's become a cranberry morpheme with a meaning along the lines of "thing for finding something, possibly (but not necessarily) what it's attached to". It's not always compositional -- Napster doesn't help you find a place to nap, and Grokster doesn't help you grok anything, but Friendster definitely is intended to help you find friends. As further evidence that people use it productively, SC was able to find coinages of "carster" and even "warezster" (perhaps surprisingly, no such site actually exists, although it would be the target of massive lawsuits if it did).

Of course, since Napster's momentum was stopped cold, "-ster" may not have much life left in it. Most of the coinages above are from 2000 or 2001; new "-sters", particularly successful ones, are hard to come by. Maybe the next big one is really going to be "-gle", with a meaning not unlike the one "-ster" was working on acquiring. Google has already introduced "Froogle", and H.P. Lovecraft fans will be delighted to learn about "Cthuugle" (which SC is grateful to Uncle Jazzbeau for coming across; he didn't mention it, but they've got a great error message for searches that come up empty). Your host failed to successfully guess any other words that "-gle" had been tacked onto to describe a search engine for something, so perhaps it won't really catch on.

Proclaiming something to be a cranberry morpheme probably requires it to have a bit more stability within common vocabulary than just being "meme-of-the-moment". "-ula" is productive in part because Dracula is well-known and has been for a long time. And "cran-" has had millions in marketing dollars behind it for many years. Maybe the closest thing that the computer science field has to a cranberry morpheme with this kind of stability and popularity is "-soft", whose owner I won't bother linking to (since they decided not too long ago that they didn't want a follow-up interview with SC; perhaps they know that he was about the last person to give up on OS/2 at home).

Comments

[Nicole Wyatt]

No more sters, but I wonder how the booble search engine (its an /cough adult site search engine so no linkage from me) works with the gle ending. Some sort of transformational rule converting bgle to ble perhaps?

[Semantic Compositions]

Maybe it's a consonant harmony rule, and the morpheme isn't really -gle, but -Cle, where C is meant to be filled in with whatever the previous consonant is.

[Kate McCreight]

Additional -sters:

Eurekster
Monster

Monster is interesting; clearly, an independent word, it may still contribute to the -ster meaning.

[Bruno Racineux]

I just found a -ster domain name. I thought I'd let you know.

I regi-stered Europster.com for a european site and I also have Psychle for a future psych search engine in the -Cle morpheme.

I think the origin of "-ster" came with words such as Gangster, Mobster, Pollster, Youngster and later Hipster. Beyond the web search, the morpheme has therefore a meaning along the lines of "a member of a group or a individual who is involved in a certain activity, or someone who has an affiliation with a certain way of life or attitude".

And unlike some think, Frienster is not a site for Hipters, it is more of a network of all "groupsters" so they can find each other.

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I also come across a word punjabster, and searched for ster word and really wonder people have been using it in for dating, community, groups etc.

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