Word.ws English Dictionary

-aster

-aster suffix: used to form diminutive and pejorative nouns, labeling someone pretending to be what they are not.

Suffix

-aster

  1. Used to form diminutive and pejorative nouns, labeling someone pretending to be what they are not.
    • poet + -aster → poetaster (“unskilled poet”)
    • critic + -aster → criticaster (“petty critic”)

Origin of -aster

Learned borrowing from Latin -aster (“little, petty, partial, incomplete”).

Questions about -aster

What does -aster mean?
-aster means used to form diminutive and pejorative nouns, labeling someone pretending to be what they are not.
What part of speech is -aster?
-aster is a suffix.

Words near -aster in the dictionary

  1. -ases
  2. -asone
  3. -ass
  4. -asses
  5. -ast
  6. -aster
  7. -astic
  8. -asvir
  9. -ata
  10. -ate
  11. -ated

Source and license

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