I feel shame. It's the kind of shame that you know you should have, and you attend years of cognitive therapy to see how irrational your shame is, but when you're lying in your four-poster bed in the dark, you can't help but feel like you're just a really a bad person.
You see, despite all my wonderful qualities, it is pretty often that I misspell the word definitely.
Yes, even me, who loves grammar so much that my children are named 'Suffix', 'Elipsis' and 'Dash' sometimes falters when I am called upon to remember whether you spell definitely or definitley.
The short story is it's definitely. You might think that that's confusing, because it's not like you say definit-elly, but you see, the e in definitely is silent. In this case, definite is the main part of the word, while -ly is the suffix.
A suffix is a group of letters that are at the end of a word to make a new word. The most common example of a suffix is the s that is added to the end of things, like cats, to indicate that something is plural.
Other examples of suffixes include:
Suffix Original Word Suffixed Word
en Eat Eaten
ing Sleep Sleeping
al accident accidental
able tax taxable
ly brother brotherly
ful forget forgetful
ly helpful helpfully
We have now learnt not only about prefixes but also suffixes, so to top all this off, let's listen to this rap that puts it all together:
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