Multiple Meanings and Suffixes
In ESL001, we also learned about using a dictionary to look up the meaning of new words we collect while reading or listening in English. It's also important to keep in mind that words often have more than one meaning. Therefore, when learning new words, you should try to match the meaning of the new word to the context it was used in when you heard or read it.
Building Vocabulary: Multiple Meanings and Suffixes
This tutorial explains how to make sure you start with the correct definition of a new word you just learned.
So, if the same word can have different meanings depending on how it is used, it also becomes important that we know and understand more than one meaning for the same word. This will help improve our vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.
This tutorial explains how to figure out the multiple meanings of a word and choose the definition that works for a specific situation.
Working with New Words
Let's imagine that you just learned the word "reconcile". You opened the dictionary, and you see that "reconcile" has several meanings. It's a very handy word! Let's see how we can use the dictionary to remember this word and start using it.
Meaning #1
to agree or become friendly again after a disagreement
Example: Sara hoped she would be able to reconcile with her sister after years of not speaking to her.Meaning #2
to make sure the numbers or facts in two documents match
Example: It is a good idea to reconcile your checkbook with your bank statement to make sure your total is the same in both documents.Meaning #3
to accept a fact or idea
Example: I am reconciled to the fact that I need to work hard to get my college degree.Word families
"Reconcile" is also part of a family of words. As we learned in ESL001, suffixes - that is groups of letters added at the end of a word - can change the part of speech of a word. So, if we use the suffix "-tion," we can change "reconcile from a verb to a noun: "reconciliation". As a noun, reconciliation means the act of reconciling.
Example: After the reconciliation, the two sisters became better friends than ever before.
The funny skit in the video below illustrates how we can use suffixes to change words.
Learning suffixes can help you guess new vocabulary in addition to helping improve your word choice when writing. In ESL001, we focused on the suffix -ly which helps us create adverbs. In this lesson, let's learn the most common suffixes for nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
The charts below list the meaning of these suffixes as well as which part of speech they can be added to in order to create a new part of speech.
For example, the noun suffix -er is added to a verb such as teach to create the noun teacher.
Common Noun Suffixes
Common Verb Suffixes
Common Adjective Suffixes
Note about using suffixes
Suffixes are great for building our vocabulary and guessing the meaning sometimes, too. However, we must be careful when using them. Unfortunately, you can't just put together any noun and the suffix -al to make an adjective to fit in your sentence ("tigeral" (tiger+al) isn't a word!). Also, it doesn't mean that all words that end in -al are adjectives (approval, for example).
So be careful – sometimes it's not possible to add or change the suffix. For example, I can't put -al on "action" to make the adjective "actional" – it's just not a word used in English. Please check a dictionary if you are unsure.
Now that we remember how to use a dictionary and suffixes to improve vocabulary, let's put this knowledge into practice.
Source:
Adapted fromTV411, https://www.tv411.org/sites/default/files/Vocab05_New-Words.pdf, https://www.tv411.org/vocabulary/dictionary-thesaurus/video-whats-thesaurus
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Adapted from Charity Davenport, https://human.libretexts.org/Under_Construction/Purgatory/Book%3A_It%E2%80%99s_All_Greek_to_Me!_(Davenport)
/01%3A_Getting_Started_with_Reading_Skills/1.05%3A_Building_Vocabulary_with_Suffixes This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.