endevorm

Endevorm is a term found in some Dutch-language linguistic descriptions to refer to the final inflected form of a word within a morphological paradigm. The precise meaning of the term varies between authors, and it is not a standard label in major reference grammars. In general, the endevorm denotes the form that carries the terminal inflectional material—typically the suffixes that encode grammatical categories such as case, number, person, tense, or mood.

The concept is primarily used in descriptive morphology and teaching to emphasize the ending part of a word. It is distinct from the stem, which carries the core lexical meaning, and from any intermediate or non-final derivational material. In languages with rich suffixal morphology, the endevorm often corresponds to the form that a word takes when it signals its final set of grammatical features within a paradigm.

Usage and scope vary with language and author. In languages like Latin, Greek, Turkish, or Finnish, where inflectional endings play a central role, linguists may refer to the endevorm when focusing on the concluding morphological segment of the word. The term tends to appear more in niche or traditional Dutch linguistic writings than in broad international grammatical terminology.

Relation to other concepts is close to that of ending, suffix, or inflected form. Because endevorm is not uniformly defined across sources, its exact scope can differ: some writers treat it as the entire inflected word, others as the final suffix alone.

See also: morphology, inflection, ending, suffix, paradigm.