Common English suffixes for finding words

A suffix appears at the end of a word. Recognizing one can help you separate a long letter set into a familiar ending and a smaller base word.

Common endings worth knowing

• -ing: often marks an ongoing action, as in running, reading and building.
• -ed: often marks a past action, as in walked, played and opened.
• -er: can describe a person or thing that does an action, as in runner or painter, or form a comparison such as faster.
• -ly: often turns an adjective into an adverb, as in quickly and softly.
• -ness: often forms a noun, as in kindness and darkness.
• -able: often means capable of being, as in readable and washable.
• -tion: appears in many nouns such as action, motion and selection.

Use endings to reduce the search space

Imagine a mixed set contains the letters for reading. Spotting ing gives you a likely ending and leaves read to solve. That is much easier than treating all seven letters as equally uncertain.

Watch for spelling changes

Suffixes can change the base word. Make becomes making, not makeing. Happy becomes happiness, changing the y to i. These changes matter when you are working from exact letters.

Use suffixes with Word Finder

If you know how a word ends, switch Word Finder to Ends With and enter the ending. Adding an exact length is useful when many words share the same suffix.

For the other side of the word, see Common English prefixes. You can also search endings directly with Word Finder.

A worked example with READING

Reserve i, n and g as an ending, leaving r, e, a and d. READ uses those remaining letters, so READ + ING uses the full seven-letter set. Now check the final spelling, rather than assuming that recognizing the suffix has solved the entire word.

Count the changed spelling

MAKING has six letters: m, a, k, i, n, g. It does not keep the e from MAKE. HAPPINESS has nine letters and uses i where HAPPY has y. If you start from a bag of exact letters, count the final word itself; counting a base word and an ending independently can lead to the wrong inventory.

Separate a suffix from a shared ending

Not every word ending in er names a person or expresses a comparison. WATER shares those ending letters, but treating it as “wat + er” does not explain its meaning. An Ends With search is a spelling search, so it may return both transparent suffix examples and words whose endings have a different history.

Practice with a clue

Suppose you remember SADNESS as a six-letter word. Count s, a, d, n, e, s, s: it actually has seven letters. The three-letter beginning sad plus the four-letter ending ness confirms the count. A six-letter filter would exclude the answer you wanted. Use the no-results checklist when a familiar word disappears after adding a length filter.