Word.ws English Dictionary

-ant

/ənt/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

India/enʈ/

-ant suffix: the agent noun derived from verb. Also the alternative form of -and.

Suffix

-ant

  1. The agent noun derived from verb.
    • serve → servant
  2. An adjective corresponding to a noun in -ance, having the sense of "exhibiting (the condition or process described by the noun)".
  3. An adjective derived from a verb, having the senses of: (a) "doing (the verbal action)", and/or (b) "prone/tending to do (the verbal action)".
    • ascend → ascendant
    • err → errant

Also used as

-ant is also the alternative form of -and.

Origin of -ant

From Middle English -ant, -aunt, partly from Old French -ant, from Latin -āns; and partly (in adjectival derivations) continuing Middle English -ant, a variant of -and, -end, from Old English -ende (present participle ending), see -and. False cognate of Malay and Indonesian -an (and so all its Austronesian cognates), and Arabic ان (“adjective forming suffix”).

Questions about -ant

What does -ant mean?
-ant means the agent noun derived from verb.
What part of speech is -ant?
-ant is a suffix.
How do you pronounce -ant?
-ant is pronounced /ənt/.

Words near -ant in the dictionary

  1. -angular
  2. -ania
  3. -anine
  4. -ans
  5. -anserin
  6. -ant
  7. -antel
  8. -anth
  9. -anthous
  10. -anthrope
  11. -anthropy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: -ant (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “-ant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/-ant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.