Word.ws English Dictionary

-arism

-arism suffix: used to form an adjective meaning "action, process, result, or ideology" from adjectives and nouns ending in -ary.

Suffix

-arism

  1. Used to form an adjective meaning "action, process, result, or ideology" from adjectives and nouns ending in -ary.
    • sectary + -arism → sectarism (“adherence to a particular sect”)
    • sedentary + -arism → sedentarism (“habit of being sedentary”)

Origin of -arism

By surface analysis, -ar(y) + -ism.

Questions about -arism

What does -arism mean?
-arism means used to form an adjective meaning "action, process, result, or ideology" from adjectives and nouns ending in -ary.
What part of speech is -arism?
-arism is a suffix.

Words near -arism in the dictionary

  1. -ard
  2. -aria
  3. -arial
  4. -arian
  5. -aric
  6. -arism
  7. -arist
  8. -arium
  9. -ariums
  10. -arol
  11. -arone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: -arism (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: “-arism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/-arism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.