Save guides, add subjects and pick up where you left off with your BBC account. When you add a suffix to a word ending in 'fer' you sometimes need to double the 'r', but how do you know when?

And thanks to the Nixon administration, American English now has a handy little suffix ... suffix “-ed.” But sometimes, this logic is applied in a way that produces new words and meanings.

"There is something belittling in the suffix 'ess,' not unlike the effect of 'ette' when it's tacked onto a word. Just as a roomette isn't quite a room, a poetess isn't quite a poet." The ...