German Word Building: Prefixes and Suffixes for Reading
By Michael McGettrickUpdated 27 September 2026
Once you know roughly a hundred German words, you already half-know several hundred more, because German builds a very large share of its vocabulary by fixing a small, closed set of prefixes and suffixes onto words you already have. This page collects the ones on the GCSE reading list: three prefixes, six suffixes, and one ending that turns a noun into an adverb. None of them need to be produced actively in your own writing; the specification lists all of these under reading, which means the job is spotting them and working out the new word's meaning on the page, not manufacturing new words yourself under exam conditions. This structure is on the AQA GCSE German (8662) specification at Foundation and Higher tier.
Two prefixes that mark "favourite" and "main"
The prefix Lieblings- attaches to the front of a noun to mean your favourite version of that thing. (colour) becomes Lieblingsfarbe (favourite colour); the same pattern gives favourite subject, favourite film, favourite book, with the base noun's own gender carrying through unchanged: Lieblingsfarbe is feminine because is feminine, the same rule you already know from compound nouns.
The prefix Haupt- works the same way but means main, in the sense of the principal or most important one. (city) becomes (capital city, literally main city); a main road, a main dish, and a main subject at school all use the same prefix. Both Lieblings- and Haupt- are always written joined to the noun that follows, never as a separate word.
un-: reversing an adjective
The prefix un- in front of an adjective flips its meaning to the opposite, exactly like English un- in unhappy or unfair. (possible) becomes (impossible); (happy) becomes unglücklich (unhappy). The prefix attaches directly with no change to the adjective itself, and the result takes ordinary adjective endings just like any other adjective would.
-ung and -er: turning a verb into a noun
Two suffixes take a verb and build a noun from it, but they build different kinds of noun.
The suffix -ung attached to a verb stem gives a feminine noun naming the result or the action itself: (to solve) gives (solution, the thing you end up with). Nouns built this way are feminine without exception, which is one of the more reliable gender rules in the language.
The suffix -er attached to a verb stem, usually after dropping the -en ending, gives a masculine noun naming the person who does the action: (to visit) gives (visitor), (to play) gives (player), (to drive) gives (driver). A feminine version adds -in on top, a female visitor being Besucherin (plural Besucherinnen, as the plurals page covers).
| verb | -ung noun | -er noun |
|---|---|---|
| | - |
| | - |
| - | |
| - | |
| - | |
Not every verb takes both suffixes, and the table above shows why the two are worth teaching separately rather than as one interchangeable pair: gives a place, , not a person, while gives a person, , not an action noun in everyday use. Which suffix a given verb actually takes is, like the compound connectors on the compound nouns page, something to learn per word rather than predict from the verb alone.
-chen and -lein: little, and a term of endearment
The suffixes -chen and -lein both attach to a noun to mean a small or endearing version of it, roughly the way English adds -let or -y (piglet, doggy). , girl, is the everyday proof that this suffix is alive in the language: it is literally maid plus -chen, little maid, though nobody today hears it as anything but the ordinary word for girl. (cat) gives Kätzchen (kitten); (house) gives Häuschen (little house, cottage). Both suffixes make the resulting noun neuter, whatever gender the base noun had; die is feminine, but Kätzchen is neuter, because -chen and -lein always win. -lein is rarer and sounds a little old-fashioned or regional next to -chen, but the meaning is the same.
-heit and -keit: turning an adjective into an abstract noun
The suffixes -heit and -keit both attach to an adjective to build an abstract feminine noun, roughly meaning -ness or -ty in English. Which one attaches depends on the adjective's own ending rather than on meaning: (ill) gives (illness), (free) gives (freedom), (true) gives (truth), and (healthy) gives (health); adjectives already ending in -ig, -lich or -bar tend to take -keit instead, as (possible) gives (possibility). Every noun built either way is feminine, no exceptions.
| adjective | noun |
|---|---|
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
A useful shortcut, not a hard rule: adjectives ending in a plain consonant or vowel, like , , and , tend to take -heit, while adjectives already ending in -ig, -lich or -bar, like , tend to take -keit instead, arguably to avoid two similar-sounding endings landing back to back. Treat it as a helpful tendency to check a guess against, not as a rule to apply blind, since a handful of adjectives break it either way.
-los: without
The suffix -los attaches to a noun to build an adjective meaning without that thing, matching English -less closely enough that the two are easy to line up directly. (work) gives (unemployed, literally work-less, with the linking -s from compound nouns), and the meaning is completely regular: whatever noun you attach it to, the result means without that noun. hilflos (helpless, from Hilfe, help) and sinnlos (pointless, from Sinn, sense) are built the same way, which is a reliable clue that -los has done its job the moment you see it.
-te and -ste: building ordinal numbers
Ordinal numbers, first, second, third and so on, are built by adding -te to the cardinal numbers one to nineteen, and -ste from twenty upwards: (two) gives (second), and the same -te pattern continues up through the teens; from (twenty) on, the ending switches to -ste, so twentieth is zwanzigste. Two numbers are irregular rather than simply adding -te: (first) and dritte (third) do not follow the pattern mechanically from and , so those two are worth learning as fixed exceptions to the rule. Siebte (seventh, not siebente in everyday use) and achte (eighth, only one t) are small spelling traps as well.
-s: turning a day or time of day into an adverb
Adding -s to a day of the week or a time of day turns it into an adverb meaning generally, on that day or at that time, rather than one specific occasion. (Monday) becomes (on Mondays, every Monday); the same happens to morning, giving morgens (in the mornings) rather than naming one particular morning. (I play football on Mondays) describes a routine, where am would describe one specific Monday.
Combining the patterns
Because all ten patterns attach to ordinary words, a single word can carry more than one of them at once, and unpicking it is simply a matter of applying the patterns one at a time rather than needing a new rule for combinations. Lieblingsbeschäftigung (favourite activity, favourite pastime) starts with Lieblings-, exactly as Lieblingsfarbe does; a compound built from -ung and a prefix works no differently from a compound built from two plain nouns; you strip the outermost layer, recognise it, and move to what is left. The same goes for a diminutive built on a noun that already carries a suffix of its own: nothing about combining these patterns changes how each one behaves individually, which is the main reason it is worth learning them as a toolkit rather than as a fixed list of finished words.
Mistakes English speakers make
The most common mistake is treating -chen and -lein purely as a spelling quirk and missing that they also change the noun's gender to neuter, so die becomes Kätzchen, not die Kätzchen.
The second is confusing -heit/-keit nouns, which are feminine and describe a quality, with -ung nouns, which are also feminine but describe a result or an action; both suffixes produce feminine nouns, which makes it tempting to treat them as interchangeable, when the base word they attach to, an adjective for -heit/-keit, a verb for -ung, is what actually decides which one is possible.
The third is forgetting that un- only reverses adjectives freely; works because is an adjective. With nouns it appears only in fixed words you learn whole (Unglück, misfortune; , nonsense), and it never goes on verbs, so it cannot simply be glued onto any noun or verb and expected to mean the opposite.
What to do next
Read these ten patterns as a toolkit for unfamiliar words, not a list to memorise word by word. The next time a compound or derived word stops you in a German text, check it against this page first: does it start with Lieblings- or Haupt-? Does it end in -ung, -er, -heit, -keit or -los? More often than the dictionary would suggest, the answer unlocks the word without you needing to look it up at all. The exercises below give you a first set of these to try.