-age Suffix

Défense d’afficher > Affichage interdit You can’t stick posters on this wall, but you can stick the suffix –age onto a verb to make a noun.
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Le suffixe -age

The French suffix -age is added to verbs or nouns to make new nouns, which are always masculine.*

1) Verb + -age

For verbs, the addition of the suffix –age indicates the purpose, action, or result of that verb, and the new noun is almost always equivalent to an English gerund.

To add –age to a verb, take the present participle and drop the –ant ending to find the stem (racine), then add the suffix. For most verbs, this is the same as if you just dropped the infinitive ending.

Par exemple…

Infinitif	English	Racine		Français	English
afficher	to post, display	affich-		affichage	posting, display(ing)
brosser	to brush	bross-		brossage	brushing
emballer	to pack	emball-		emballage	packing
raser	to shave	ras-		rasage	shaving

However, for regular -ir verbs, there’s an extra syllable: –iss–

Infinitif	English	Racine		Français	English
blanchir	to bleach	blanchiss-		blanchissage	laundering
nourrir	to feed	nourriss-		nourrissage	feeding
remplir	to fill	rempliss-		remplissage	filling

2) Noun or adjective + -age

Less commonly, -age is added to nouns to indicate either a group of that noun or some enhancement to it. Note that the final letter of the noun may be doubled.

Nom	English		Français	English
échafaud	scaffold		échafaudage	scaffolding
rayon	shelf		rayonnage	shelving, set of shelves
seuil	threshold		seuillage	thresholding

 * Attention : French nouns with the suffix -age are always masculine – see Masculine noun endings. However, there are a few words, like page and image, that end in the letters (not the suffix) age and are feminine.

Want more?

For a complete list of French words that end in –age, try the amazing Recherche par critères feature of Le Petit Robert:

 Related lessons

• Infinitives
• Masculine noun endings
• Nouns
• Present participles

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