880: More Obscure Derivational Suffixes May 6, 2017

There are many ways to change the part of speech of words in English using derivational suffixes, but this tends to depend on the individual word, and for it, there are standard endings. While there may be multiple ways that people say the nominal form of 'deep', either as 'depth' or sometimes 'deepness', this is largely from not knowing some of the more obscure suffixes. 'Candor' is another word that sometimes is found instead with the '-ness', as in 'candidness', though arguably those two nouns carry different connotations. This is also not the only example of an adjective with '-id' that has a nominal form with '-or', as there is also 'splendid' or 'horrid' but there are not too many of these, so not knowing this would be fairly understandable. This is especially true since there are some adjectives like 'torrid' and 'putrid' that do not become 'torror' and 'putror' as nouns respectively.