In
linguistics, a
suffix (also sometimes termed
postfix or
ending or, in older literature,
affix) is an
affix which is placed after the
stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the
grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the
conjugation of verbs. Particularly in the study of
Semitic languages, a suffix is called an
afformative, as they can alter the form of the words. In
Indo-European studies, a distinction is made between suffixes and endings (see
Proto-Indo-European root). A word-final segment that is somewhere between a free morpheme and a bound morpheme is known as a
suffixoid or a
semi-suffix (e.g., English
-like or German
-freundlich 'friendly').
