Merriam-Webster declared the suffix “-ism” as the word (except it’s technically not one) that best summed up 2015. ... which is even less a word than a suffix is, as their word of the year.

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Note that the “less” suffix turns a noun into an adjective. To turn it back into a noun, you have to add another suffix, often “ness”: “fecklessness,” “shiftlessness,” and “guilelessness.” It would ...

Learn bow to use word parts, like prefixes and suffixes, to break big words down into understandable word parts. Special thanks to Great Lakes Now for the use of footage from their program ...

It’s tempting to think of “long” as being just like “able” and “less” and “ship,” which are both words and suffixes. But “long” is not a suffix. It’s just a word.

Listening to the stress of the final syllable can help you when adding suffixes to words. Find out more in this Bitesize Primary KS2 English guide.

As a word by itself—which is to say, not as a suffix—ish means more or less the same thing: kind of, thereabouts, in a way. And imagining how it broke free to become syntactically stand-alone ...

Discover More Stories About Words: A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2025. This article was originally published on mentalfloss.com as 11 Suffixes That Gave Us New (And ...

It’s hard to believe that, in the year 2020, we are still arguing over whether “irregardless” is a word. It is. Not a good one, necessarily, but a word. In late June, Christine Rousselle, a DC ...

For their research, Martin and his colleagues studied specific word characteristics among the two populations -- one whose language relies more frequently on suffixes (51 English speakers) and one ...

This is called a suffix. Different suffixes change words and their meanings. By adding the word ‘less’, which means to take away, root can become rootless. At other times, ...