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There are about ten times as many words ending in -ence than in -ense, so there's one simple rule of thumb to distinguish them: When in doubt, go with -ence. But is there any sort of rule besides memorize the exceptions that captures these -ense words more clearly?

I'm an English language native (Northeast U.S.) and a reasonably good speller, but there are a few of these which trip me up occasionally. While I'm not overly worried about that, I am curious if I'm missing some easy trick.

This is a list of a few of the -ence words and most of the -ense ones, and I don't see anything. Am I missing it?

-ence (a few) -ense (almost all)
absence cense
affluence commonsense
ambivalence condense
cadence defense
coherence dense
coincidence dispense
commence expense
competence hypertense
confluence immense
credence incense
difference intense
eloquence lense
essence license
fence multisense
frequence nondefense
inference nonsense
licence offense
omnipotence prepense
pence pretense
prominence propense
science recondense
transcendence relicense
transference sense
turbulence suspense
whence tense
Scott Sauyet
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    I think you're being somewhat optimistic in hoping for any solid rules when it comes to spelling in English. – KillingTime Mar 15 '23 at 19:52
  • Yeah, I know. But occasionally I get surprised by rules I and everyone else unknowingly follow: things like adjective ordering, or ablaut reduplication. I just wondered if there was some hidden rule I'd never noticed. – Scott Sauyet Mar 15 '23 at 19:54
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    And of course many are different in UK English (which sometimes uses -SE for verb and -CE for noun, a distinction lost in US English). I suspect that the -nse are more likely to come from Latin words in -nd- (supine -nsum), while -ce is from -nt- or similar, except for the cases where the US spelling was modified, and even that isn't a general rule. – Stuart F Mar 15 '23 at 21:16
  • Who cares? English spelling is irrelevant to the English language. Let spellcheck take care of it. There is no rule, short of memorizing all of those. – John Lawler Mar 15 '23 at 21:55
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    Lense? Don't you mean lens? (Which comes from the Latin for lentil, because convex lenses are lentil-shaped.) – Kate Bunting Mar 16 '23 at 09:14
  • @KateBunting: It's simply a variant spelling, I believe. I pulled these from one fairly large word-list. – Scott Sauyet Mar 16 '23 at 12:44
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    @JohnLawler Spellcheck is a very blunt tool, and can't tell when you meant e.g. ‘to affect’ (to make a difference to) vs ‘to effect’ (to make something happen) vs ‘an affect’ (an emotional state of mind) vs ‘an effect’ (a change). Or many other confusingly-similar cases. Spellcheck is no substitute for knowing the language. – gidds Mar 16 '23 at 15:49
  • @gidds - Spelling is a blunt tool. You can't tell the difference between affect and effect in spoken English, and it doesn't bother us. It's only spelling that hasta make imaginary distinctions. Nobody cares how you spell. – John Lawler Mar 16 '23 at 16:05
  • @JohnLawler: Well I hope people can tell the difference when I pronounce those two words! :-) – Scott Sauyet Mar 16 '23 at 16:15
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    All the words of more than one syllable in your list that are stressed on the last syllable are spelt '-ense'. (But this is not true for British spelling, which has e.g. 'defence' and 'pretence'.) – TonyK Mar 16 '23 at 16:45
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    Most of the words in the left-hand column are abstract nouns derived from an adjective: for example absence from absent. This is not the case for any of the words in the right-hand column. – John Bentin Mar 16 '23 at 17:23
  • After this discussion, it was amusing that today's New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle contains "E", "N", and "C", and that there are so few "-ence" words!. – Scott Sauyet Mar 17 '23 at 14:54

3 Answers3

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In elementary school, starting in first or second grade, we were given a list of 10 words on Monday and were expected to memorize how they were spelled for the quiz on Friday.

In the same vein, I made a list.

When I used a regex dictionary search to find ense$ words, more than 10 words were returned. However, when grouped by etymology, I got less than 10 families of words. (Nine to be exact!) And some of the words are obscure (marked in parentheses), so you can probably ignore those and still live a happy life:

  • (antisense), commonsense, (missense), (multisense), no-nonsense, nonsense, sense
  • (cense), frankincense, incense
  • condense, dense, (superdense)
  • defense, offense, self-defense *
  • dispense, expense, (prepense), recompense, suspense
  • (flense)
  • immense
  • intense, pretense, tense
  • license, sublicense

(* If you decide to switch to British spellings, these words are spelled with a c instead.)

The words in the -pense family have no obvious commonalities in meaning, but they come from pendere "to hang, cause to hang; weigh; pay" (see Etymonline's entry for pensive, for a related example).

To summarize:

When in doubt, go with -ence[...] memorize the exceptions

Laurel
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  • Another nice tool that I've never seen. I did my own version against a relatively comprehensive but older wordlist. and came up with a similar -ense set. But it's just a wordlist, no etymologies, parts of speech, etc. This is useful. And I'm guessing you're right; it's mostly memorization... I'm terrible at memorization. :-( – Scott Sauyet Mar 16 '23 at 13:00
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    License also has the alternate licence spelling for non-USAers, although I think it's only different for the noun. – Kit Z. Fox Mar 16 '23 at 13:25
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    @KitZ.Fox you are exactly right. In British English license (and prefixed derivatives) is the verb, whilst licence is the noun – Tristan Mar 16 '23 at 15:08
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    Heh, I use missense and antisense several times a day as they are very common in my field (genomics). Always fun to remember that just because I happen to be familiar with some esoteric jargon doesn't mean that the words are actually common! – terdon Mar 16 '23 at 16:28
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Etymonline gives a detailed history of suffix -ence.

-ense is actually not a suffix the way -ence/ance is.

word-forming element attached to verbs to form abstract nouns of process or fact (convergence from converge), or of state or quality (absence from absent); ultimately from Latin -antia and -entia, which depended on the vowel in the stem word, from PIE *-nt-, adjectival suffix.

Latin present-participle endings for verbs stems in -a- were distinguished from those in -i- and -e-. Hence Modern English protestant, opponent, obedient from Latin protestare, opponere, obedire.

As Old French evolved from Latin, these were leveled to -ance, but later French borrowings from Latin (some of them subsequently passed to English) used the appropriate Latin form of the ending, as did words borrowed by English directly from Latin (diligence,absence).

English thus inherited a confused mass of words from French (crescent/croissant), and further confused it since c. 1500 by restoring -ence selectively in some forms of these words to conform with Latin. Thus dependant, but independence, etc.

user 66974
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A first approximation is that most of the words ending -ence have adjectival forms ending -ent (or in some cases extensions of this such as -ential or -entific) whereas the words ending -ense do not.

Many of the words on the right do not really use -ense as a suffix but come from adding a prefix to another word such as "sense".

Especially Lime
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  • That's nice, but the exceptions are large; if we had an equivalent for -ense it could be very helpful, but as everyone has pointed out, this is not really used as a suffix here. – Scott Sauyet Mar 16 '23 at 13:15