Word.ws English Dictionary

-faction

-faction suffix: the act of creating something, or (more broadly) any process involving the specified thing.

Suffix

-faction

  1. The act of creating something, or (more broadly) any process involving the specified thing.
    • lith- (“stone”) + -i- + -faction → lithifaction (“the compaction and cementation of sediment into rock”)
    • aer- (“air”) + -i- + -faction → aerifaction (“aeration, hyperinflation of the lungs”)

Origin of -faction

Borrowed from French -faction, from Latin -factiō. This is the ending that arises when forming action nouns using -tiō (equivalent to English -tion) from compound verbs ending in -faciō (“to make, to do”), which carry a causative meaning. For example, liqueō (“to be liquid”) + faciō > liquefaciō (“to make (something) liquid”) > liquefactiō > English liquefaction. The suffix was later applied to other Latin stems where no Latin verb in -faciō existed (e.g. lubrifaction) and, eventually, even more freely (but see usage notes). Compare -ification and -ication.

Words formed from -faction

Questions about -faction

What does -faction mean?
-faction means the act of creating something, or (more broadly) any process involving the specified thing.
What part of speech is -faction?
-faction is a suffix.

Words near -faction in the dictionary

  1. -exia
  2. -ey
  3. -ez
  4. -f
  5. -facient
  6. -faction
  7. -facture
  8. -fag
  9. -fenac
  10. -fentanil
  11. -fer

Source and license

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