Is the suffix -ette used for referring to a female? The -ette suffix is normally applied to women, not objects designed specifically for women Thus suffragette , your dudette , usherette and the like The French language uses -ette to feminise names: Paul Paulette, Claude Claudette, etc , and the same principle is used to feminise some nouns in English to create a female variant
suffixes - Is there a Male suffix equivalent to -et -ette? - English . . . It appears that in the native french the masculine is -et and the feminine is -ette Both meaning a smaller form of something else, for example a Cigarette is a smaller cigar At some point English seemed to pick it up as a term meaning a feminine version of something else as well
Changes in English names of people @Cyril John Lennon probably wouldn't answer to Jack My name is John, and I wouldn't answer to Jack But, it wouldn't be unusual for people to begin calling a John "Jack" early in their life, and then it would stick
Origin of fag (meaning a cigarette in British English) According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it comes from "fag", meaning a loose piece of cloth: fag (n 1) Look up fag at Dictionary com British slang for "cigarette" (originally, especially, the butt of a smoked cigarette), 1888, probably from fag "loose piece, last remnant of cloth" (late 14c , as in fag-end "extreme end, loose piece," 1610s), which perhaps is related to fag (v ), which
When did it become fashionable to drop ts in certain words? Sometime in the 1500s "How to Pronounce 'Often'" There’s a \t\ in often, but how often do you hear it? As you might guess, the \t\ was pronounced in the past, when the word began as a variant of oft (also spelled ofte in Middle English), which was the more common form until the 1500s
What happened to the “‑est” and “‑eth” verb suffixes in English? To expand on this, morphological leveling isn't a random phenomenon It can be difficult to track the precise reasons for a specific change, but we can conjecture that it might be similar to issues like verb agreement in Modern English ("they you is")
word choice - Approach to or approach for - English Language . . . approach to NOUN When used as a verb, 'approach' takes no preposition However, when as a noun, it requires a preposition, otherwise you end up with two nouns in a row: "The pilot's approach [ ] the runway was too low "