Scrabble?! DESINENCE

Definitions of DESINENCE in various dictionaries:

In linguistics, a suffix (sometimes termed postfix) 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, suffixes are called afformatives, 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). Suffixes can carry grammatical information or lexical information. An inflectional suffix is sometimes called a desinence or a grammatical suffix or ending. Inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category Derivational suffixes can be divided into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation.