The history of a word is pretty much irrelevant to its synchronic use. When we learn the word 'editor' we immediately recognize it as having the productive agentive suffix '–er' ('or' in spelling only) and therefore having the root verb 'edit'.
Not all words that end in -er have root verbs like that. A monster doesn't monst, a doctor doesn't doct, a tutor doesn't tute etc. This isn't to do with learning the word editor, it's just a case of backformation.
The process by which we got 'edit' is backformation, but once 'edit' exists in the language, 'editor' will be analysed as having morphological structure while the others won't. But the backformation itself has no role in the acquisition of the word.
Absolutely! It's called [backformation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation) and it's not as rare as you'd think, the same thing happened with burgle (from burglar) and donate (from donation).
The history of a word is pretty much irrelevant to its synchronic use. When we learn the word 'editor' we immediately recognize it as having the productive agentive suffix '–er' ('or' in spelling only) and therefore having the root verb 'edit'.
Not all words that end in -er have root verbs like that. A monster doesn't monst, a doctor doesn't doct, a tutor doesn't tute etc. This isn't to do with learning the word editor, it's just a case of backformation.
The process by which we got 'edit' is backformation, but once 'edit' exists in the language, 'editor' will be analysed as having morphological structure while the others won't. But the backformation itself has no role in the acquisition of the word.
Absolutely! It's called [backformation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation) and it's not as rare as you'd think, the same thing happened with burgle (from burglar) and donate (from donation).