Morphology is a branch of biology that studies the internal and external structures of an organism. The study of external structure is called eidonomy, and anatomy examines the internal structure. Morphology concentrates on the appearance, color and structure of organs and bones rather than their physiology, which focuses on their function. Morphology plays an important role in the taxonomical categorization of life forms, which means categorizing plants and animals by species.
Studying linguistic morphology encompasses three approaches. In morpheme morphology, words are analyzed as sequences of morphemes. For example, "independently" breaks down into the morphemes in-depend-ent-ly. "Depend" is the root of the word; the rest of it are morphemes. With the lexeme-based approach, the focus is on word stems and how additions to the stem change meaning, as with "dog" and "dogs." The word-based approach tends to look at word patterns and changes in word use, such as "family" or "relations" replacing the old-fashioned "kindred."
Linguistic morphology breaks down into numerous terms. One of the most important ones for English is the lexeme. This refers to the fact that singular and plural words are essentially the same word. One example from English is the use of "s." In English, when the word "dog" becomes "dogs," readers and speakers know that the concept of one has become the concept of more than one. The addition of an "s" neatly distinguishes between single and plural. Some other languages choose not to make such a clear distinction between single and plural, and instead rely on syntax to indicate meaning.
Another morphological feature of English is its tendency to take a noun and add a suffix such as -ify as a way of creating a new verb. "Beautify" means to make something beautiful; "iconify" means to turn somebody or something into an icon. However, you "vaporize" something to turn it into vapor and "emulsify" rather than "emulsionify." As usual, English doesn't always follow a general rule. But, English is one of the few languages that can turn a noun into a verb: other languages have to use expressions.