desinence

Desinence is a linguistic term that refers to the final part of a word that marks grammatical information. It is typically an inflectional ending, realized as a suffix, a final vowel, or, in some languages, a final consonant. Desinences encode aspects of a word’s role in a sentence, such as number, case, gender, tense, mood, voice, or person, and they vary across languages and word classes.

In morphology, a desinence is the specific ending that a form of a word takes in a given paradigm. For example, in Latin, verb endings such as -ō, -ās, -at indicate person and number, while noun endings in various cases signal grammatical function. In English, desinences include the present tense third-person singular ending -s in walks and the past tense ending -ed in walked, as well as plural endings like -s. Languages with rich inflectional systems rely on many desinences, whereas analytic languages rely more on word order and auxiliary words and have fewer or no desinences.

Desinence is also used in historical linguistics to describe the loss or reduction of final inflectional endings over time, a process known as desinence loss or apocope of endings. Such changes can lead to a shift from synthetic to more analytic structures, as earlier endings become zero endings or disappear entirely.

In scholarly writing, desinence is often treated as a synonym for inflectional ending or ending, though some authors distinguish between the physical realization of the ending (desinence) and the abstract category it expresses (inflection). Examples across languages illustrate how endings convey grammatical relationships rather than lexical meaning.