-ine
suffix ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Of or pertaining to. idiomatic, morpheme
"asinine, marine, bovine, cervine"
- 2 Used to form feminine nouns. idiomatic, morpheme
"hero + -ine → heroine"
- 3 Found in the plural forms of a small number of English words. Not productive. morpheme
"cow + -ine → kine"
- 4 used to form vernacular nouns and adjectives relating to animal taxonomic subfamilies morpheme
"cardueline, velociraptorine"
- 5 Used to form demonyms. morpheme
"Levantine, Byzantine, Argentine, Florentine"
Show 4 more definitions
- 6 Used to form female given names or names of titles. idiomatic, morpheme
"Clement + -ine → Clementine"
- 7 Used to form names of chemical substances, especially basic (alkaline) substances, alkaloidal substances, or halogen elements. morpheme
"amine, aniline, caffeine, iodine"
- 8 used to form vernacular nouns and adjectives relating to hominoid genera morpheme
"australopithecine, dryopithecine, pithecanthropine"
- 9 Commercial materials. morpheme
"glass + -ine → glassine"
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"asinine, marine, bovine, cervine"
Etymology
From Middle English -in, -ine, from Old French -in, -ine, from Latin -īnus, from Proto-Indo-European *-iHnos. More at -en.
From French -ine, feminine of -in; Latin -īna, feminine of -īnus.
Variant of -en.
From taxonomic suffix -inae, ultimately from the same root as Etymology 1.
More for "-ine"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.