Defining -Ish

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Liz from Richardson, Texas.

Hello, Liz from Richardson.

Yes.

What’s up, Liz?

Well, I was calling about the Suffolk-ish.

Now, I’ve seen it in normal words like English or Famish or Peckish, but I’ve noticed that many people, including myself, are now using it for things like greenish, like that’s a greenish car, or meet me at three-ish, which doesn’t seem to be standard English to me.

And so I was just wondering how this came about into our everyday language and what ish actually means.

Aha, very interesting.

So you feel like this is a new phenomenon, that the application of the suffix ish to times and colors is something recent?

Well, I became aware of it recently, whether it’s been around before then. I don’t know.

That was a setup. I was setting you up so I could give you the big reveal.

And the big reveal is that adding it to colors is one of the oldest uses of that suffix in English.

And adding it to times is somewhat more recent. You can find records of it as far back as 100 or more years ago.

And probably that has more to do with keeping accurate time wasn’t quite so common then as it is now.

So ish was always the case rather than the exception to the case.

Well, I have a perfectly good timepiece, and I always say ish because I’m usually late.

There’s Martha time, and then there’s everyone else’s time.

I understand.

The interesting thing about ish is that it does more than one job.

You can use it attached to a noun to mean like that thing.

So I can say that the building was not a house, but it was kind of house-ish, meaning it was kind of like a house, right?

But the thing is some things don’t work like that.

If I called you bookish, that doesn’t mean you’re like a book, right?

No, it means I like a book.

Yeah, it means that you like it.

And so they behave different ways.

There’s a lot of work been done on the suffix because it’s so productive, as they say, in the creation of new words.

The ish suffix is so prevalent that you can attach it to an incredible number of words, mostly nouns, but sometimes phrases and come up with a lot of new words.

And sometimes those new words are temporary where we just use it for a moment, like house-ish.

And sometimes they become established.

Like if I say that you’re peckish, well, peckish kind of stands alone.

We don’t really use peck very much anymore to mean to eat, right?

Okay, I kind of thought that peck was like a basket size.

Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

It means pecking at your food, right?

Right, yeah.

It’s like a bird.

So we use it in common things like to say that you’re Irish, you know, because that’s a nationality.

And that’s perfectly ordinary, right?

It means that you’re of the Irish or like the Irish or you are Irish.

We also use it for long sentences.

I could say, and we were arguing and we were talking, and then she gave me this look that was kind of all like, don’t give me any of that stuff-ish.

You know, I can attach ish to a phrase.

So ish is incredibly interesting in terms of its productivity.

It’s got a fundamental role in suggesting that something is kind of like something else or maybe even a lot like something else.

Cool?

So the language is a lot bigger than we even think, right?

Oh, it’s massive.

Dictionaries, no dictionary, including the Oxford English Dictionary, no dictionary comes close to including every word that can exist in English.

Liz, thank you so much for giving us a ring.

Well, thank you.

Okay, thanks for coming.

Bye-bye.

Take care of yourself. Bye-bye.

Bye.

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