affixed

Affixed is the past participle form of the verb affix, meaning attached, fastened, or appended to something. In ordinary usage, it describes objects that have been physically connected or officially added, such as a stamp affixed to a letter, a label affixed to a package, or a signature affixed to a document. The word can also function as an adjective, as in “an affixed seal.”

Etymology traces affix to the Latin affixus, from affigere “to fix to,” formed from ad- “toward” and figere “to fix.” The English verb affix emerged in the medieval period, with affix serving as a noun for a morpheme added to a word.

In linguistics, affixed refers to a bound morpheme that attaches to a base or root to modify meaning or grammatical function. Affixation is the process by which prefixes (before the base), suffixes (after the base), infixes (inside the base in some languages), and circumfixes (surrounding a base) are added. A word that carries one or more affixes is an affixed word; for example, happiness contains the base “happy” plus the suffix “-ness,” and unhappy adds the prefix “un-.”

Usage notes emphasize context: in legal or administrative writing, “affixed” often denotes something physically attached or stamped, while in linguistic descriptions it denotes the presence of grammatical morphemes attached to a word. Overall, affixed denotes attachment, whether concrete (a seal on a document) or morphological (an affix attached to a stem).