Learning Prefixes and Suffixes
Knowing the Greek and Latin roots of several prefixes and suffixes (beginning and endings attached to words) can also help us determine the meaning of words. Ante, for instance, means before, and if we connect bellum with belligerant to figure out the connection with war, we'll know that antebellum refers to the period before war. (In the United States, the antebellum period is our history before the Civil War.)
Prefixes showing quantity

Meaning Prefixes in English Words

half semiannual, hemisphere

one unicycle, monarchy, monorail

two binary, bimonthly, dilemma, dichotomy

hundred century, centimeter, hectoliter

thousand millimeter, kilometer
Prefixes showing negation

without, no, not asexual, anonymous, illegal, immoral, invalid, irreverent, unskilled

not, absence of, opposing, against nonbreakable, antacid, antipathy, contradict

opposite to, complement to counterclockwise, counterweight

do the opposite of, remove, reduce dehorn, devitalize, devalue

do the opposite of, deprive of disestablish, disarm

wrongly, bad misjudge, misdeed
Prefixes showing time

before antecedent, forecast, precede, prologue

after postwar

again rewrite, redundant
Prefixes showing direction or position

above, over supervise, supererogatory

across, over transport, translate

below, under infrasonic, infrastructure, subterranean, hypodermic

in front of proceed, prefix

behind recede

out of erupt, explicit, ecstasy

into injection, immerse, encourage, empower

around circumnavigate, perimeter

with coexist, colloquy, communicate, consequence, correspond, sympathy, synchronize

Authority for this table: The Little, Brown Handbook by H. Ramsay Fowler and Jane E. Aaron, & Kay Limburg. 6th ed. HarperCollins: New York. 1995. By permission of Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc.
Suffixes, on the other hand, modify the meaning of a word and frequently determine its function within a sentence. Take the noun nation, for example. With suffixes, the word becomes the adjective national, the adverb nationally, and the verb nationalize.
See what words you can come up with that use the following suffixes.
• Typical noun suffixes are -ence, -ance, -or, -er, -ment, -list, -ism, -ship, -ency, -sion, -tion, -ness, -hood, -dom
• Typical verb suffixes are -en, -ify, -ize, -ate
• Typical adjective suffixes are -able, -ible, -al, -tial, -tic, -ly, -ful, -ous, -tive, -less, -ish, -ulent
• The adverb suffix is -ly (although not all words that end in -ly are adverbs—like friendly)