The following table shows the rules of detachment used by Morphy. If a word ends with one of the suffixes, it is stripped from the word and the corresponding ending is added. Then WordNet is searched for the resulting string. No rules are applicable to adverbs.

center, box, tab(+) ; c | c | c l | l | l. POS+Suffix+Ending _ NOUN+"s"+"" NOUN+"ses"+"s" NOUN+"xes"+"x" NOUN+"zes"+"z" NOUN+"ches"+"ch" NOUN+"shes"+"sh" NOUN+"men"+"man" NOUN+"ies"+"y" VERB+"s"+"" VERB+"ies"+"y" VERB+"es"+"e" VERB+"es"+"" VERB+"ed"+"e" VERB+"ed"+"" VERB+"ing"+"e" VERB+"ing"+"" ADJ+"er"+"" ADJ+"est"+"" ADJ+"er"+"e" ADJ+"est"+"e"

There is one exception list file for each syntactic category. The exception lists contain the morphological transformations for strings that are not regular and therefore cannot be processed in an algorithmic manner. Each line of an exception list contains an inflected form of a word or collocation, followed by one or more base forms. The list is kept in alphabetical order and a binary search is used to find words in these lists. See wndb(5WN) for information on the format of the exception list files.

In general, single words are relatively easy to process. Morphy first looks for the word in the exception list. If it is found the first base form is returned. Subsequent calls with a argument return additional base forms, if present. A is returned when there are no more base forms of the word.

If the word is not found in the exception list corresponding to the syntactic category, an algorithmic process using the rules of detachment looks for a matching suffix. If a matching suffix is found, a corresponding ending is applied (sometimes this ending is a string, so in effect the suffix is removed from the word), and WordNet is consulted to see if the resulting word is found in the desired part of speech.

As opposed to single words, collocations can be quite difficult to transform into a base form that is present in WordNet. In general, only base forms of words, even those comprising collocations, are stored in WordNet, such as attorney~general. Transforming the collocation attorneys~general is then simply a matter of finding the base forms of the individual words comprising the collocation. This usually works for nouns, therefore non-conforming nouns, such as customs~duty are presently entered in the noun exception list.

Verb collocations that contain prepositions, such as ask~for~it, are more difficult. As with single words, the exception list is searched first. If the collocation is not found, special code in Morphy determines whether a verb collocation includes a preposition. If it does, a function is called to try to find the base form in the following manner. It is assumed that the first word in the collocation is a verb and that the last word is a noun. The algorithm then builds a search string with the base forms of the verb and noun, leaving the remainder of the collocation (usually just the preposition, but more words may be involved) in the middle. For example, passed asking~for~it, the database search would be performed with ask~for~it, which is found in WordNet, and therefore returned from Morphy. If a verb collocation does not contain a preposition, then the base form of each word in the collocation is found and WordNet is searched for the resulting string.

Hyphenation also presents special difficulties when searching WordNet. It is often a subjective decision as to whether a word is hyphenated, joined as one word, or is a collocation of several words, and which of the various forms are entered into WordNet. When Morphy breaks a string into "words", it looks for both spaces and hyphens as delimiters. It also looks for periods in strings and removes them if an exact match is not found. A search for an abbreviation like oct. return the synset for {~October,~Oct~}. Not every pattern of hyphenated and collocated string is searched for properly, so it may be advantageous to specify several search strings if the results of a search attempt seem incomplete.