tell me about prefixes

[Sparrow]

Compiling a prefix list for an area is incredibly fun work. Tell me how you've gone about doing it and some of your favorite prefixes from your compiled list!

I'm on the third pass through my own list right now. First pass was to write down everything I could think of in my area, second was looking up lists of native plants and animals and getting down any that looked familiar or are native to the area I'm looking at, and the third pass is going through everything, deciding how often the cats would see it, and what pelt colors it would actually work for.

I love Sycamore as a prefix - sycamore bark is very distinctive and beautiful, brown at the bottom and flaking to reveal white at the top. It can be a brown and white patched or pointed cat (colorpoint is fairly common in one of my clans because they had siamese mixes in their ancestry). Also Hepatica, and Goldenrod, because goldenrod is such a distinctive prairie plant and man I love native plants you have no idea. For birds I love Blackbird, which is actually for torties because it references the red-winged blackbird, and Siskin and Chickadee are just really cute names!

[Foxthroat]

What I do, when compiling prefixes, is this:

1. First I start with what I call 'universal prefixes'. Cloud-, Night-, Rain-, Snow-, Sand-, Gray-, Brown-, etc. These can pretty much apply to any setting, so get them noted down first, and if I'm not using some (like Snow-, Ice-, for a hot setting or I'm only using a bare handful of color prefixes) I cross those off the list.

2. Then I work out what I call 'subjective prefixes'. Morning-, Dawn-, Boulder-, Rock-; these can very in color interpretation slightly (Morning- could be yellow/cream or gray; Rock- could be brown or gray or even red); so I figure out which color connotation is ascribed to each in my settings, or even if different clans in the same place view them differently.

3. Next I work out what I call 'locale prefixes'. Here I actually research the flora and fauna of the setting and compile a list; I'm still touching up my list for my Georgian clans, and at some point I may post that on my blog, as it will be monstrously long.

4. Finally, I determined the color connotations of each prefix. So, I look at an animal or plant and figure out what color it could match to in a cat. For a plant, I will also determine if multiple parts could work, and if different clans perhaps use different parts (for example, I have a clan who prefers to use plant prefixes only, but they tend to have more brown-pelted cats than red or white, so they typically use bark-colors when it comes to plant prefixes where others might aim for berries or leaves or flowers instead.

I usually make a chart for the second and fourth steps, so that I can keep track of what each clan does, prefix-wise.

[Honeystorm]

I'm still searching prefixes but I remember how I went about it. First, I went with color, pattern, time, and weather prefixes, which were easy to look up. Then, I searched for the animal and plant prefixes in this order: bird, fish, mammal, tree, and wildflower. I still need to look at the "miscellaneous" and "insect" prefixes.
One of my favorite prefixes is definitely "Magpie-" and one of the founders of CherryClsn is Magpiecloud, a black-and-white tom. Another of my favorites is Cherry- and of course, we have Cherrystar, the dark ginger she-cat leader of CherryClan. I also like Chub- and Grebe-, two bird prefixes who have their place in Chubpaw (Chub-) and Grebepaw (Grebenose)