Glossary: suffix

This is Lesson #1 of a unit of 10.

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Teacher Slide

Objective: grammar

To understand that nouns are words that represent people, places and things, to understand how they are formed, and to understand what some of their grammatical characteristics are.

Please read the lesson plan in the Manual before delivering this lesson.

Activity 3: How many words?

Look at the sentence below and answer the following questions:

1. How many different words, in the sense of dictionary words, are there?
2. Which items can be grouped together as forms of the same word?

• I think teasing tigers is unwise, because I teased a tiger once and barely escaped alive.

Activity 2: Same word or different words?

Would you say the following are different words or the same word?

• hesitate, hesitates, hesitated, hesitating

It depends what we mean by ‘word’! In one everyday sense, they are all different words.

Activity 1: Finding word parts

From the list below, pick out the words that are complex. Can you break them down into meaningful parts?

1. bread
2. sunshine
3. fossil
4. sleepwalker
5. unhappy
6. umbrella
7. rebuild
8. laughing

There are some further questions on the next slide.

Now look at the parts of the words that you have found. Which ones can be used on their own?

In this activity, explore how words are built out of a prefix, base form and a suffix. 

What meanings do different prefixes and suffixes have? Can any base form take any prefix or suffix? How can you manipulate language to create new forms? For example, deread is not an English word. What might it mean?

If a root word ends in a consonant, adding a suffix will sometimes require that you double the base word’s final consonant. How do you know when to double the consonant?

Consider the following examples, where doubled consonants are underlined.

• shipment
• shipped
• muddy
• fitful
• fittest
• waiting
• greenest

Now take a look at some larger words, whose base forms have more than one syllable.

Suffixes cause many of our common spelling mistakes. One challenge is simply to know which is correct: for example, legible or legable? In fact, −ible and −able serve the same function, and sound the same. As a matter of history, -ible entered English from Latin, while −able entered English from French, but there’s no easy rule for knowing when to use which suffix. Each word with each suffix just requires practice.

Many common spelling errors occur with double consonants or vowel combinations, as in the following words:

If an original word ends in a final e, as in manage,adding a suffix will sometimes require that you drop the final e in the root word.

• Drop the final e: managing
• Keep the final e: management

How do you know when to drop the final e?

First, consider the following examples, which either drop or keep the final e.