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Do you want to increase your Spanish vocabulary? One sure-fire way is to take the words you already know and learn how to apply suffixes to them.
Suffixes are simply word endings that can be used to modify a word's meaning. We use them in English all the time, and nearly all of them that we use in English have a Spanish equivalent. But Spanish has an even wider variety, and their usage isn't always as obvious as it would be in English.
Take a common word like manteca, for example. That's the word for lard, a much-used cooking ingredient in Mexico and some other Spanish-speaking countries. Add the ending -illa, a common ending, and it becomes mantequilla, or butter. Add the ending -ero, and it becomes mantequero, which can mean either a dairyman or a butter dish. (The spelling is changed from c to qu to maintain the pronunciation.) Add the ending -ada, and it becomes mantecada, or buttered toast. Add -ado, and it becomes mantecado, or french ice cream.
Unfortunately, and the above words are an example, it isn't always possible to figure out what a word means simply by knowing the root word and the suffixes. But the suffixes may give enough clues that in context you can make a more educated guess. For example, the -ado and -ada endings are often the equivalent of the English "-ed." So it isn't hard to see how mantecada could come to mean something buttered, just as in English "a malted" can refer to a milkshake with malt in it.
Spanish suffixes can roughly be classified as diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives, English cognates, and miscellaneous ones. And one, the adverbial suffix, is in a class of its own.
