a suffix occurring originally in adjectives borrowed from Latin, formed from nouns denoting places (
Roman; urban) or persons (
Augustan), and now productively forming English adjectives by extension of the Latin pattern. Attached to geographic names, it denotes provenance or membership (
American; Chicagoan; Tibetan), the latter sense now extended to membership in social classes, religious denominations, etc., in adjectives formed from various kinds of noun bases (
Episcopalian; pedestrian; Puritan; Republican) and membership in zoological taxa (
acanthocephalan; crustacean). Attached to personal names, it has the additional senses “contemporary with” (
Elizabethan; Jacobean) or “proponent of” (
Hegelian; Freudian) the person specified by the noun base. The suffix
-an, and its variant
-ian also occurs in a set of personal nouns, mainly loanwords from French, denoting one who engages in, practices, or works with the referent of the base noun (
comedian; grammarian; historian; theologian); this usage is especially productive with nouns ending in
-ic, (
electrician; logician; technician). See
-ian for relative distribution with that suffix.