Word Type
-en is a suffix:
- Denotes the past participle form when attached to a verb.
"As in , ; , ; ," - Can be used to denote the plural form of a small number of English words whose etymology goes back to the N-stem (i.e. Weak noun) declension of Germanic languages.
"Examples: , ; , ; , ; , ; , ; , ; ," - When attached to certain adjectives, it forms a transitive verb whose meaning is, to make (adjective). Usually, the verb is ergative, sometimes not. The same construction can also be done to certain (fewer) nouns, as, strengthen, in which case the verb means roughly, to give (noun) to.
"Examples: , ; , ; ," - When attached to certain nouns that are the names of a material, it forms an adjective whose meaning is, made of (noun). This is a formative pattern with many obsolescent remnants. Changes in the form of the root noun, and the dropping of the "e" in the suffix occur. There are also orphan formations whose root has been lost to the current language.
"Current examples: , ; ,"
undefined Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is -en?
- Suffix usage: As in , ; , ; ,
- Suffix usage: The -en suffix is also used formally to denote any English past participle, even if it does not use the suffix.
- Suffix usage: Such a use may be described formally as + >
- Suffix usage: Examples: , ; , ; , ; , ; , ; , ; ,
- Suffix usage: Examples: , ; , ; ,
- Suffix usage: Current examples: , ; ,
- Suffix usage: Obsolete examples: , (for its orginal, rather than metaphorical use); , ; ,
- Suffix usage: Orphan examples: ( was called );
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of -en are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of -en, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
