The Rice University Neologisms Database

Having beauty. Beautiful. Instead of using the word comprised of ‘beauty’ and the suffix ‘-ful’, the speaker replaced the borrowed element ‘beauty’ with the native English adjective ‘pretty.’ Although ‘pretty’ is already an adjective without any type of suffix, it looks similar to the noun ‘beauty,’ which does require the suffix ‘-ful’ to make it into an adjective. The writer added an unnecessary ‘-ful’ to ‘pretty’ by analogy to the word ‘beautiful.’ The writer wanted to emphasize the idea of attractiveness by drawing attention to the adjective indicating attractiveness. Rather than using a standard word such as “pretty” or “beautiful” she created a more eye-catching an unusual word.