Word.ws English Dictionary

-ine

/-aɪ̯n/

-ine suffix: of or pertaining to.

Suffix (1)

-ine

  1. (idiomatic) Of or pertaining to.
    • asinine, marine, bovine, cervine
  2. Used to form demonyms.
    • Levantine, Byzantine, Argentine, Florentine
  3. Used to form names of chemical substances, especially basic (alkaline) substances, alkaloidal substances, or halogen elements.
    • amine, aniline, caffeine, iodine
  4. used to form vernacular nouns and adjectives relating to hominoid genera
    • australopithecine, dryopithecine, pithecanthropine
  5. Commercial materials.
    • glass + -ine → glassine

Suffix (2)

-ine

  1. (idiomatic) Used to form feminine nouns.
    • hero + -ine → heroine
    • speaker + -ine → speakerine
    Synonyms:
    -a, -ess, -ette, -ina, -ress, she-, -trix
    Antonyms:
    he-
  2. (idiomatic) Used to form female given names or names of titles.
    • Clement + -ine → Clementine
    • landgrave + -ine → landgravine

Suffix (3)

-ine

  1. Found in the plural forms of a small number of English words. Not productive.
    • cow + -ine → kine
    • sow + -ine → swine

Suffix (4)

-ine

  1. used to form vernacular nouns and adjectives relating to animal taxonomic subfamilies
    • cardueline, velociraptorine

Synonyms of -ine

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of -ine

Origin of -ine

From Middle English -in, -ine, from Old French -in, -ine, from Latin -īnus, from Proto-Indo-European *-iHnos. More at -en § Etymology 4.

From French -ine, feminine of -in; Latin -īna, feminine of -īnus. Doublet of -ina.

Variant of -en § Etymology 2.

Questions about -ine

What does -ine mean?
-ine means of or pertaining to.
What part of speech is -ine?
-ine is a suffix.
How do you pronounce -ine?
-ine is pronounced /-aɪ̯n/.

Words near -ine in the dictionary

  1. -in-law
  2. -in-waiting
  3. -ina
  4. -inator
  5. -inda
  6. -ine
  7. -ing
  8. -ing-form
  9. -ing-forms
  10. -ino
  11. -ins

Source and license

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