suffix
- 01 B2 Upper Intermediate
a letter or group of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning or its part of speech.
an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. It can be derivational, changing the word class, or inflectional, indicating grammatical features like tense or number.
Simple“In the word 'happiness', the suffix is '-ness', which turns the adjective into a noun.”
In context“The student struggled to identify whether the suffix was purely inflectional or if it altered the semantic core of the lexeme.”
UsageCommonly used in linguistics and language learning to describe word formation.
- 02 C1 Advanced
a character or string of characters added to the end of a sequence.
a final segment or sequence of characters appended to a string, or a subscript used in mathematical notation.
Simple“The file name has a '.txt' suffix so the computer knows it is a text document.”
In context“The algorithm identifies the longest common suffix between two strings to determine their structural similarity.”
Borrowed from Latin suffīxus (“suffix”), from sub- (“under”) + fīxus (perfect passive participle of fīgere (“to fasten, fix”)), equivalent to sub- + -fix.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.