Word.ws English Dictionary

-cism

-cism suffix: excessive usage of the phoneme.

Suffix

-cism

  1. Excessive usage of the phoneme.
  2. A sound change towards the phoneme.
  3. The retention of a phoneme when related varieties lose it.
  4. A speech disorder marked by either excessive or defective use of the phoneme.

Origin of -cism

Back-formation from iotacism.

Questions about -cism

What does -cism mean?
-cism means excessive usage of the phoneme.
What part of speech is -cism?
-cism is a suffix.

Words near -cism in the dictionary

  1. -cide
  2. -cies
  3. -cillin
  4. -cin
  5. -cir-
  6. -cism
  7. -citabine
  8. -clase
  9. -clasis
  10. -clast
  11. -clastic

Source and license

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