Word.ws English Dictionary

-oid

UK/-ɔɪ̯d/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia/-oɪ̯d/

-oid suffix: resembling; having the likeness of (usually including the concept of not being the same despite the likeness, but counterexamples exist).

Suffix

-oid

  1. Resembling; having the likeness of (usually including the concept of not being the same despite the likeness, but counterexamples exist).
    • human + -oid → humanoid
    • sterol + -oid → steroid
  2. (uncommon) Of, pertaining to, or related to.
    • lympho- + -oid → lymphoid
    • myelo- + -oid → myeloid
  3. Added to nouns to create derogatory terms, typically referring to a particular ideology or group of people.
    • waste + -oid → wastoid
    • west + -oid → westoid
  4. Added typically to the name of an algebraic structure, to denote the horizontal categorification of that structure.
    • group + -oid → groupoid
    • ring + -oid → ringoid

Synonyms of -oid

1 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of -oid

Origin of -oid

Learned borrowing from Latin -oīdēs, from Ancient Greek -ο-ειδής (-o-eidḗs) (the ο being the last vowel of the stem to which the suffix is attached); from εἶδος (eîdos, “form, likeness”).

Questions about -oid

What does -oid mean?
-oid means resembling; having the likeness of (usually including the concept of not being the same despite the likeness, but counterexamples exist).
What part of speech is -oid?
-oid is a suffix.
How do you pronounce -oid?
-oid is pronounced /-ɔɪ̯d/ (UK).

Words near -oid in the dictionary

  1. -offs
  2. -oh
  3. -oholic
  4. -oi
  5. -oic
  6. -oid
  7. -ol
  8. -ola
  9. -olater
  10. -olatry
  11. -ole

Source and license

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