Learning Prefixes and Suffixes ( Vocabulary Face-lift)

Everyone—from beginning learners in English to veterans in journalism—knows the frustration of not having the right word immediately available in that lexicon one carries between one's ears. Sometimes it's a matter of not being able to recall the right word; sometimes we never knew it.

 It is also frustrating to read a newspaper or homework assignment and run across words whose meanings elude us. Language, after all, is power.  Building a vocabulary that is adequate to the needs of one's reading and self-expression has to be a personal goal for every writer and speaker.

Another method that we are going to talk about in our effort of enhancing vocabulary is learning about Prefixes and Suffixes.

Learning Prefixes and Suffixes

Knowing the Greek and Latin roots of several prefixes and suffixes (beginning and endings attached to words) can also help us determine the meaning of words.

Prefixes showing quantity
	Meaning	Prefixes in English Words
	half	semiannual, hemisphere
	one	unicycle, monarchy, monorail
	two	binary, bimonthly, dilemma, dichotomy
	hundred	century, centimeter, hectoliter
	thousand	millimeter, kilometer
Prefixes showing negation
	without, no, not	asexual, anonymous, illegal, immoral, invalid,irreverent, unskilled
	not, absence of, opposing, against	nonbreakable, antacid, antipathy, contradict
	opposite to, complement to	counterclockwise, counterweight
	do the opposite of, remove, reduce	dehorn, devitalize, devalue
	do the opposite of, deprive of	disestablish, disarm
	wrongly, bad	misjudge, misdeed
Prefixes showing time
	before	antecedent, forecast, precede, prologue
	after	postwar
	again	rewrite, redundant
Prefixes showing direction or position
	above, over	supervise, supererogatory
	across, over	transport, translate
	below, under	infrasonic, infrastructure, subterranean,hypodermic
	in front of	proceed, prefix
	behind	recede
	out of	erupt, explicit, ecstasy
	into	injection, immerse, encourage, empower
	around	circumnavigate, perimeter
	with	coexist, colloquy, communicate, consequence,correspond, sympathy, synchronize

Suffixes, on the other hand, modify the meaning of a word and frequently determine its function within a sentence. Take the noun nation, for example. With suffixes, the word becomes the adjective national, the adverb nationally, and the verb nationalize.

See what words you can come up with that use the following suffixes.

• Typical noun suffixes are -ence, -ance, -or, -er, -ment, -list, -ism, -ship, -ency, -sion, -tion, -ness, -hood, -dom
• Typical verb suffixes are -en, -ify, -ize, -ate
• Typical adjective suffixes are -able, -ible, -al, -tial, -tic, -ly, -ful, -ous, -tive, -less, -ish, -ulent
• The adverb suffix is -ly (although not all words that end in -ly are adverbs—like friendly)