Word.ws English Dictionary

-our

-our suffix: used to form abstract nouns of state, quality, or action from Latin or French roots.

Suffix

-our

  1. (UK, Commonwealth spelling) Used to form abstract nouns of state, quality, or action from Latin or French roots.
    • colour, favour, honour, labour, valour

Forms of -our

alternative form-or

Origin of -our

From Middle English -our, from Anglo-Norman -our, -ur, and Old French -or (modern -eur), from the Latin accusative suffix -ōrem, from -or. The spelling with u reflects the Anglo‐Norman raising of the Old French close‐mid vowel /o/ (which developed from the Latin long vowel /oː/) to a high‐back vowel /u/. In the United States, the spelling -or—which had coexisted as a variant since Middle English—was standardized by Noah Webster to match the original Latin form.

Questions about -our

What does -our mean?
-our means used to form abstract nouns of state, quality, or action from Latin or French roots.
What part of speech is -our?
-our is a suffix.

Words near -our in the dictionary

  1. -ostomy
  2. -ote
  3. -oth
  4. -otic
  5. -otomy
  6. -our
  7. -ous
  8. -out-law
  9. -ov
  10. -oxacin
  11. -oxanide

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: -our (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “-our.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/-our. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.