wordendings

Word endings, often called suffixes, are morphemes that attach to the end of a word to modify its meaning or grammatical function. They are a key part of morphology, shaping how words relate to one another in a sentence.

Two broad classes of endings are inflectional and derivational. Inflectional endings provide grammatical information such as tense, number, or case without usually changing the word’s lexical category. For example, in English, -s marks plural (cat becomes cats) and -ed marks past tense (walk becomes walked). Derivational endings create new words or shift the word class, such as -ness forming nouns from adjectives (happy → happiness) or -ize turning nouns or adjectives into verbs (organize).

Languages differ in how they use endings. Some, like Turkish or Finnish, are highly agglutinative, building long chains of suffixes on a single stem to express multiple grammatical relations. Others, such as English, rely more on word order and function words, with relatively fewer inflectional endings. German and Spanish use endings to mark case, gender, number, and tense, while Latin, Russian, and other languages employ rich systems of noun and verb endings that convey a wide range of grammatical information.

Endings play a central role in syntax as well as semantics. They can indicate the subject or object (through case endings), agreement between words, or the tense and aspect of a verb. Derivational endings contribute to vocabulary size and semantic nuance by enabling new words and different grammatical categories.

In computational linguistics, word endings present both opportunities and challenges. Morphological analysis and stemming or lemmatization aim to reduce words to base forms by handling endings, while irregular endings require lexical knowledge and exceptions for accurate processing.