Thinking about productivity requires us to look not just at a few examples of words that have a particular prefix or suffix, but at lots and lots of examples. You might wonder how morphologists go about finding all the words with one affix or another. For prefixes, of course, we can look in a dictionary and find words formed with that prefix alphabetized more or less together. I say “more or less” because sometimes non-prefixed words will intervene alphabetically between forms with a prefix (for example, prelude intervenes between preloved and premarital in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary). But in a normal dictionary, words with suffixes are alphabetized according to their bases. Nevertheless, there are at least two ways of finding all the words with a particular suffix.

The first is to look in a backwards word list like Lehnert (1971). A backwards word list gives words alphabetized starting with the last letter, rather than the first. So all the words with -ity or -ness can be found together. A few of the -ity words to be found in Lehnert (1971: 584) are shown in the sidebar. You’ll notice that using a backwards word list is not a perfect tool: such word lists simply alphabetize words from the end to the beginning, so any word ending in -ity will occur in the list, not just words that really have the suffix -ity. In the list I give here, in addition to real -ity words like oddity and rancidity, we find ‘junk’ like rumti-iddity (spelled two different ways!); a bit earlier in the list we would have found the word city which of course also ends in the sequence of letters ity. In the list here, we also find the word acidity, plus four other derivatives of it (subacidity, nonacidity, hypoacidity, hyperacidity). So if you work with a backwards word list, be prepared to go through it word by word and check whether you really have an example of the suffix you’re looking for, and whether you really just have one example, as opposed to several derivatives of the same word.

It is also possible to find words with a particular suffix by using the OED On line. To do so, instead of typing a whole word in the Find Word box, type the suffix preceded by *. The asterisk is what’s called a ‘Wild Card’. It stands for any characters that precede the ones that you’re looking for. Again, you’ll get a long list which contains many words with the suffix in question, plus a lot of ‘junk’. As with the backwards word list, you’ll need to be prepared to go through by hand and weed out those examples that don’t really contain the suffix you’re interested in.