adjectives - Creating words with "-able" suffix


What are general rules of thumb for creating adjectives with -able? I wanted to denote an object as having an ability to be tiled, but "tileable" and "tilable" both yielded as incorrect words by spell check and standard English dictionary used by Mac OS X dictionary widget. Is "tileable" or "tilable" a correct word/form for denoting an object having an ability to be tiled?



Answer



The way I see it, you've got two choices here if the word doesn't already have an acceptable -able suffix counterpart. Either



  1. Reword the sentence so you don't need to use the -able suffix

  2. Hyphenate it. E.g. tile-able.


Although, Googling it, 'tileable' seems to be pretty widely used anyway.


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