Univerbation

In linguistics, univerbation is the diachronic process of combining a fixed expression of several words into a new single word.
The univerbating process is epitomized in Talmy Givón's aphorism that "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax".

Examples

Some univerbated examples are always, onto, albeit, and colloquial gonna and finna.
Although a univerbated product is normally written as a single word, occasionally it remains orthographically disconnected. For example, acts like a single adjectival word that means 'cheap', the opposite of which is cher as opposed to mauvais marché.

It may be contrasted with compounding. Because compound words do not always originate from fixed phrases that already exist, compounding may be termed a "coercive" or "forced" process. Univerbation, on the other hand, is considered a "spontaneous" process.
It differs from agglutination in that agglutination is not limited to the word level.
Crasis is one way in which words are univerbated in some languages.