Have you ever noticed that the ending of a word can change its meaning? Sometimes this is a simple change, like when ‘work’ (the activity) becomes ‘worker’ (the person who works).
But sometimes the change is bigger, like when you put ‘-ism’ at the end of ‘cube’ (i.e. a shape with six square sides) to make ‘Cubism’ (i.e. the artistic movement).
All of this is related to suffixes, which are a crucial part of the English language. As such, we thought it would be helpful to set out what suffixes are and how they’re used to create new words.
Suffixes are common word endings. Each suffix has a different use, so by adding or changing the suffix at the end of a word we can create a new term with a different meaning.
For instance, ‘-ful’ is a suffix that we see at the end of words like ‘helpful’, ‘wonderful’ and ‘beautiful’. This suffix means ‘full of’ or ‘characterised by’, so something ‘beautiful’ is full of beauty!
You can’t use every suffix with every word, though, so we can’t add ‘-ful’ to the term ‘happy’ to describe something that is characterised by happiness (although being ‘happiful’ sound good to us).
As a result, you should check any word you’re unsure about when adding a suffix.
We won’t try to list all of the suffixes in English here. However, we can offer you a few examples to show you the different ways they can work. Keep an eye out for words that end with the following:
Suffix
Use/Meaning
Examples
-al (noun)
Added to a verb to denote a process
Arrive → Arrival
Bury → Burial
Recite → Recital
-al (adjective)
Added to nouns to mean ‘related to’
Emotion → Emotional
Grammar → Grammatical
Region → Regional
-dom
Indicates a place or state of being
Bore → Boredom
Free → Freedom
King → Kingdom
-ise/ize
Used to form verbs, usually indicating a change of some kind
Carbon → Carbonise
Fossil → Fossilise
Hospital → Hospitalise
-ism
Used to denote a set of beliefs (often a theory or practice, but sometimes discriminatory)
Capital → Capitalism
Sex → Sexism
Social → Socialism
Some words can’t be broken down as easily as those above. The word ‘organise’, for example, doesn’t mean ‘turn into an organ’ in the modern sense of ‘organ’ (e.g. a body part or instrument). The ‘-ise’ in ‘organise’ still indicates change, but the ‘organ’ part is related to the Latin word organum (i.e. a tool). So, to ‘organise’ something is to prepare it for a particular function or role!
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Keep in mind that the spelling of some words changes when adding a suffix. If a word usually ends in a ‘y’, for example, the ‘y’ will often change to an ‘i’ when you add a suffix (e.g. beauty → beautiful). And when a word usually ends in an ‘e’, the ‘e’ is sometimes dropped (e.g. love → loving).
But these rules are not universal. For instance, even though ‘change’ ends in an ‘e’, when we add the adjective suffix ‘-able’, it becomes ‘changeable’ (not ‘changable’). This, again, makes it important to check any word you’re unsure about (or have your work proofread) when adding a suffix.
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