Forming abstract nouns using suffixes

Two quizzes based on a 'bank' of more than 200 abstract nouns. View by base word type or go for a random selection.

Traditional grammar divides nouns into:

• Proper nouns - the names of people, organisations, products and places etc. They always begin with a capital letter
  Peter Davidson, the United Nations, Blogger, Poland etc
• Common nouns - everything else
  butter, dogs, love, travel etc

We can further divide common nouns into:

• Concrete nouns - these describe things that can be experienced with at least one of the five senses, you can see them, hear them, smell them, taste them, and/or feel them.
• Abstract nouns - these describe things that cannot be detected with the senses: things like emotions, ideals and ideas.

Abstract nouns can be both countable and uncountable, but most of the ones in this post are uncountable. Many abstract nouns are formed from other words - adjectives, verbs and nouns - usually by adding a suffix to them, and that's what we'll be looking at here.

Occasionally two different abstract nouns can be made from the same base word. This is the case with:

• abstain > abstinence, abstention
• admit > admission, admittance
• deceive > deception, deceit
• live > life, livelihood
• obey > obedience, obeyance
• proceed > process, procedure
• progress > progress, progression

In these cases I've only listed the first.

This post has three sections:

1. Matching game
2. Gapfill exercise
3. Reference section

You can choose between different classes of base word, and between the most common abstract nouns, as listed in the Oxford 3000™ (see link below) or all the abstract nouns in my list. In the quizzes, the base words can be shown alphabetically (default) or randomised.

1. Matching game

Notes

As well as suffixes, the quiz may include one or more of three categories

• other - has a different ending to those listed or changes completely
• stem change - usually involves a consonant change, eg v to f
• no change - the abstract noun is the same as the base word

Select Adjectives Verbs Other nouns -ion most common all Randomised

           

 

2. Gapfill exercise - enter the correct word

You can adjust the number of columns for easy printing

Select adjectives verbs other nouns all to abstract noun from abstract noun most common all

Options: Randomised Quiz length 12 18 24 30 36 48 60 No of columns 1 2 3

Showing Qs out of

Your exercise will appear here

Random Idea English
http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com

3. Reference

Select adjectives verbs other nouns -ion words all most common all

Random Idea English
http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com

Links

• LearnEnglish.de
• About.com - Grammar
• English Banana.com ( Scribd)
• FunEasyEnglish - quiz
• The Star (Malaysia) - Mind Our English - list of suffixes
• Your dictionary - description
• Oxford 3000™ text checker

More Words.com

This website is really a word finder for crosswords, Scrabble® etc, but has some useful lists of the most common words with specified endings:

• -ism
• -ity
• -ment
• -ness
• -nce
• -th
• -ion
• -dom
• -ship
• -hood
• -cy
• -ry