suffix

Suffix is a morpheme attached to the end of a word to modify its meaning or grammatical function. Unlike prefixes, which attach at the beginning, suffixes come after the word stem and can alter its part of speech, tense, number, mood, or other grammatical categories. In many languages, suffixes are a central mechanism of word formation and inflection.

Suffixes can be derivational or inflectional. Derivational suffixes create new words or change word class, such as -ness in happiness, turning an adjective into a noun, or -able in readable, forming an adjective indicating capability. Inflectional suffixes indicate grammatical information without significantly changing core meaning: English examples include -ed for past tense, -ing for present participle, -s for plural; -er and -est for comparison; and -'s for possession.

Cross-linguistic patterns vary. Some languages, such as Turkish, are highly agglutinative and attach long chains of suffixes. Inflection-heavy languages like Latin, German, and Finnish use extensive suffixation to mark case, number, and gender. English uses relatively fewer inflectional suffixes than these languages but relies heavily on derivational suffixes and word order to convey meaning.

Morphology and analysis: suffixation involves phonological adjustments, and allomorphy can produce different phonetic forms of a suffix (for example, various pronunciations of the plural -s). In natural language processing, suffix stripping and lemmatization simplify word forms. Educationally, teaching suffixes aids decoding, spelling, and vocabulary development. See also: prefix, infix, morpheme.