Word Formation
Build your IT vocabulary systematically — word families, prefixes, suffixes, and compound words used daily in software development. 4 intermediate exercise sets.
Intermediate Word Formation
Word Families
Recognise and use the noun, verb, adjective, and adverb forms: deploy/deployment/deployable, configure/configuration/configurable.
Intermediate Word Formation
IT Prefixes
Practise the meanings and usage of re-, un-, de-, pre-, micro-, over-, under- in technical English.
Intermediate Word Formation
IT Suffixes
Master -tion, -ity, -able, -er, -less, -ful in IT contexts: scalability, configurable, middleware.
Intermediate Word Formation
Compound Words
Identify and correctly use codebase, callback, backend, middleware, upstream, downstream — and know which are one word, hyphenated, or two words.
Word Formation Quick Reference
Common IT word families
- deploy → deployment, deployable, deployer
- configure → configuration, configurable, configurability
- scale → scalable, scalability, scaling, scaled
- maintain → maintainable, maintainability, maintenance
High-frequency prefixes
- re- = again: redeploy, refactor, revert, rollback
- de- = remove/reverse: decouple, deprecate, deserialise
- micro- = small: microservice, microcontroller, microbenchmark
- pre- = before: preload, prefetch, preprocess
Compound word rules
- One word: codebase, callback, backend, frontend, middleware
- Hyphenated: end-to-end, plug-in, trade-off, built-in
- Two words: source code, open source, pull request, tech debt