The Arabic language sub-science known as صرف – referring roughly to what we know as Morphology as well as Etymology – is a subject through which one learns the internal assembly of a word by way of patterns of vowelization and introduction of extra letters—or what we call a template.

Morphology differs from Lexicology in the sense that the latter gives the root meaning associated to a set of base letters, whereas the former gives all other meanings and connotations achieved by the template.