How to Enhance Your Vocabulary with Noun Suffixes

Some of my most popular articles on Associated Content have been those I wrote about prefixes (list at the end of this article). I recently got an email from a home-school parent asking about articles on suffixes, the particles added to the ends of words. Suffixes in English are neither as much fun nor as useful as prefixes - maybe not as sexy - and there is a historical reason for that.

A basic characteristic of English is the "forwarding of stress." As words are used over many years, the accent (or stress) tends to move to the front of an English word. The best example of this is the change in the name of a character about whom both Geoffrey Chaucer (probably 1343-1400) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote. Chaucer wrote a poem about Troilus and Criseyde (pronounced cri-SAY-deh). Some two centuries later, Shakespeare wrote a play about the characters, who by then were Troilus and Cressida (CRESS-i-dah). The change in spelling and pronunciation across a period of time is due to the stress or accent moving from the second syllable to the first.

I have heard the forwarding of stress today in the speech of people who have grown up in households of first or second generation speakers of English, although they themselves are native speakers. I had a friend whose grandparents had literally "come over on the boat" who used to talk about what he had done on the WEEK-end (although most native speakers of English put equal stress on both syllables of weekend). In a restaurant, he would order ICED tea, while I ordered iced tea (again, with equal emphasis). It seems that such speakers overcompensate for the stress, especially if they come from families that speak Spanish or Italian, languages in which the stress tends to be toward the end of the word.

As the stress moved forward in English, the endings became of less importance, including the declensions, the noun endings that indicated in Old English the way the noun functioned in a sentence. Declensions, functional endings of nouns, were characteristics of Greek and Latin, and they still are seen in modern languages such as German. The only declension that we have in modern English is what used to be called the genitive but is now called the possessive, represented by 's.

English suffixes do little more than indicate the part of speech of a word: noun, adjective, or adverb. A noun is a word that names a person, a place, or a thing, and many of our words with suffixes (writer, socialist) name persons. Many suffixes in English begin with vowels that may change depending upon the root word. All the suffixes in this article indicate that the word is a noun. (In a later article, I shall discuss suffixes that form adjectives and adverbs.)

These first suffixes or endings have no meaning, except to identify an action, a quality, or a state of being. Using one of these suffixes, I might say they refer to the "noun-ness" of the words: -acy, -cy: celibacy (state of being celibate), intimacy (state of being intimate); -age: chaperonage (activity of being a chaperone); -ance, -ence: assistance (act of assisting); clearance (state of being clear); -ation: specialization (the state of being distinguished by one special quality); -ia: anesthesia (state of having no sensation or feeling), anorexia (state of having no appetite); -ity, -ty: lucidity (act of thinking clearly or lucidly), novelty (state of being new or unusual); -ness: adventurousness (state of being adventurous), gentleness (state of being gentle); -ship: companionship (state of being a companion), relationship (state of being related).

The ending or suffix -ing similarly does not have much meaning. It is more functional, indicating material for, activity, or result of an activity. Examples include flooring (material for floors), running (the activity of one who runs) or planting (the result of putting plants into an area).

Many words in English refer to a person or thing that performs an action, by adding the suffixes -er or -or to a verb that names the action: actor (a person who acts), collector (a person who collects/gathers things), elevator (a thing that elevates/lifts), teacher (a person who teaches). Notice that we are dropping the -ess feminine form (poetess, actress). Philip Seymour Hoffman is an actor in the film Doubt... and Meryl Streep is an actor in the same film. The word waitress has gradually fallen out of favor, with the wait staff of both sexes being referred to as waiters. The word waitron, which was floated a couple of decades ago, never really caught on. Using a generic masculine form (actor, waiter) for both sexes is typical in other languages. In Spanish, for instance, your female friend is your amiga, but your male friend is your amigo. If you have a hundred female friends (amigas) and then add one male friend (amigo), you have 101 amigos.

The ending or suffix -ism refers to belief or doctrine, as seen in words such as communism, pacifism, socialism, and terrorism, while -ist refers to a person who has that belief or doctrine: communist, pacifist, socialist, and terrorist. English, of course, has to keep us on our toes. A person who believes in patriotism is not a patriotist, but a patriot.

The ending or suffix -ology means the study of a field of knowledge: biology (study of living things, from bios), cardiology (study of the heart, from cardio), etymology(study of meaning, from etym), geology (study of the earth, from geos). And, the ending -ist is a student of that field: biologist, cardiologist, etymologist, and geologist.

The suffix or ending -phobia means fear as in, among many fears, agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and claustrophobia (fear of closed in places). A person suffering a fear is a -phobe, as in agorophobe or claustrophobe.

The suffixes -archy and -ocracy, which are related, both refer to government: democracy (government by the demos, the people) or theocracy (government by a theos or god), monarchy (government by one, mono-) or gynarchy (government by a woman, who, of course, goes to a gynocologist for medical treatment). Endings referring to people can be seen in democrat and theocrat, monarch and gynarch.

The suffix -cide refers to the act of killing, as well as to the person (or in some instances thing) that does the killing. Killing the father is patricide, killing the mother is matricide, and the person who performs such an act is a patricide/matricide. Killing an infant is infanticide, perpetrated by an infanticide. To kill oneself is to commit suicide, to make oneself a suicide (sui generis, one's own unique genre or genus). To kill a plant, reach for the herbicide, the thing which kills a plant as well as the act of killing a plant. By the way, in the accompanying photo (taken at Dinosaur World in Plant City, Florida - http://www.dinoworld.net), the dryptosaurus is committing dinosauricide, which of course, makes her a dinosauricide, although, of course, I am making up that word.

This list is certainly not complete, not even for suffixes that are used as the endings of nouns. Although there are not as many suffixes in English as there are prefixes, and suffixes are not as significant to the meaning of words as are prefixes, learning to recognize the meaning of a few suffixes can give you another tool to deal with words, whether in reading or vocabulary tests.