Word parts prefixes and suffixes

You use prefixes, suffixes, and word roots every day, whether you realize it or not. These parts of words make up almost all of the words we use in the English language and you will find that the meanings of many unfamiliar words become much more clear when you understand the meanings of the most common of these word parts.

A prefix is the word part placed at the beginning of a word. It is usually only one syllable, but sometimes it is more. Its job is to change or add to the meaning of a word. For example, you probably

use the word review on a regular basis. What does it mean? Let’s break it down. First, we can break it down into syllables: re-view. View means to look at, and the prefix, re- adds to the meaning of the word. Re- means back or again, so by putting together what you already know, you can figure out that the word review means to look back at, or to look at again. Other common prefixes include, in-, anti-, pre-, post-, un-, non-, con-, and dis-.

A suffix is a word part placed at the end of a word that signals how a word is being used in a sentence and identifies its part of speech. When you attach different suffixes onto the base of a word, they change the word’s

part of speech. For example, the word sterilize is a verb meaning to sanitize. As an adjective, it takes the suffix, -ile and becomes sterile. As a noun, it takes the suffix -tion and becomes sterilization. The suffix changes the word’s job in a sentence and it also helps give you a clue as to the meaning of an unfamiliar word.

The pieces of words that carry direct meaning are called roots . Many English words stem from ancient Greek and Latin words, and because so many English words have their source in certain recurring root words, knowing some of the most commonly used roots gives you access to many words at once. Thus, when you combine your knowledge of prefixes and suffixes with your knowledge of roots, you can figure out the meaning of many unfamiliar words. For example, the word root cogn- means to know. Words that include this root are recognize, meaning to identify as known, incognito, meaning unknown, and cognition, meaning knowledge. You can see how knowing the base of these three words, in addition to having knowledge of prefixes and suffixes, can really help you work out the meanings of unfamiliar words.

note: originally posted at Exposeknowledge.com under the same author.

A reader asks about the terms prefix, root, and suffix, and wonders how to distinguish them in a word.

At the most basic level, words are made up of units of meaning called morphemes. A morpheme may be a recognizable word like tree, run, or button that cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts.

A morpheme can represent meaning without being a word. For example, the prefix un- expresses the idea of negation. The suffix -ness, used to turn adjectives into abstract nouns, is a morpheme. The root struct, seen in structure and construct, is a morpheme that embodies the meaning of “to build,” but it cannot stand alone as an English word.

A root is a word’s basic part and carries its fundamental meaning. In the word sadness, for example, the root is sad. Sometimes two roots combine to make one word, as in telephone, a combination of the morpheme tele, which relates to distance, and the morpheme phone, which relates to sound.

Prefixes and suffixes belong to a set of morphemes called affixes. An affix is an element added to the base form or stem of a word to modify its meaning.

Standard English makes use of two types of affix: prefixes and suffixes. A prefix is added at the beginning of a word. For example, the prefix re- is added to a root or a word to denote the idea of doing it again: return, renew, reconstruct.

A suffix is added at the end of a word.

Suffixes are of two kinds, derivational and inflectional. A derivational suffix changes the underlying meaning of the word; an inflectional suffix changes the tense of a verb or the number of a noun, or performs some other grammatical purpose.

Some common derivational suffixes are, -er, -al, -ful, and -ize. The suffix -er added to a verb creates a person or object that performs the action of the verb: teach/teacher, walk/walker, kill/killer, compute/computer; -al and -ful change nouns into adjectives: accident/accidental, forget/forgetful; -ize changes a noun into a verb: terror/terrorize.

Common inflectional suffixes are endings such as, –ed, -ly, -‘s, -s, -er, -ed, -es, -est, and -ing.

Derivational endings are added to a root. For example, the word reconstruction is made up of the root struct, two prefixes, re- and con-, and a suffix, tion. (Because struct ends in t and tion begins with t, one of the ts had to go.)

Inflectional endings are added to a stem, which is the entire word that the ending is being added to. In the words reconstructed and reconstructing, for example, the stem is reconstruct-.