 An exocentric compound refers to the combination of two or more roots, words, or phrases whose grammatical head does not straightforwardly define its meaning. Instead, the head of the compound describes some unexpressed semantic head. Compare these two examples, laser printer and gray beard. In the first example, printer is both the grammatical and semantic head of the compound. Grammatically speaking, printer takes on all the inflectional markers. For instance, laser printer can be pluralized to laser printers. Semantically speaking, a laser printer is the type of printer. In the second example, the grammatical head of the compound is beard, as it takes the inflectional markers. However, beard does not define the meaning of the compound. A gray beard is not a type of beard, but rather an old man. In the English language, exocentric compounds refer most often to human beings or in the rare case to animals. Much exocentric compounds, as for example redneck, loudmouth, or redskin, denote a person with a quality expressed by the compound. A loudmouth is someone who has a loudmouth, and a redskin is someone whose skin is a reddish color. These compounds consist of an adjectival modifier and a noun head. Another type of exocentric compound consists of a verb modifier and a noun head. For example, pickpocket, cutthroat, killjoy. These compounds are rare and the pattern is unproductive.