Is there a Male suffix equivalent to -et/-ette?

I wanted to add a suffix to crone and damsel that would make them masculine without resorting to a male equivalent word, (that's a different question.)

We have the male-to-female conversion example of bachelor → ‎bachelorette

Is there a reverse suffix for traditionally feminine words?

Croner and damseler (following widower ← widow) seems lacking.


Historically, there are very few words where the male version is derived from the female. For example, A junior English grammar (1902) lists four: bridegroom, drake, gander, and widower (but OED does not support the claim that drake and gander were formed this way).

You already mentioned widower, so let's look at bridegroom. According to OED, it was formed from brýd + guma. The word bride is obviously still in use, but guma is not. In Middle English it was spelled gome. According to OED:

After gome n.1 became obsolete in Middle English, the place of bridegome was taken in 16th cent. by bridegrome , < grome , groom n.1 ‘lad’.

Because gome is obsolete, as is the sense of groom meaning "lad", it's not a great choice.

However, there is another option (not a suffix though) not mentioned by that source. The prefix man- is used in several compounds, for example:

  • Man nurse
  • Man midwife
  • Man whore
  • Man slut
  • Man slag

(Note that some of these compounds can be written as closed or hyphenated too.)

Interestingly enough, there are some instances already out there for the words you mentioned:

We haven't seen each other for a couple of years. I am a man-crone.
Hal Crawford on Twitter

Still, though, doesn’t the crone get pent up? Who gets the crone’s rocks off? Does she find a man-crone for that?
The Road by Anna Bardin

It’s got Brandon Flowers as a man-damsel in distress
The Music Video for Brandon Flowers’s “Crossfire” Has Got EVERYTHING

Eugene is mincing away from a small gang of three walkers, a Man-Damsel In Distress.
barnfullawalkers: The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 5, “Self Help”


Yet another option may be to look for synonyms, where the word doesn’t have an etymological connection. Some resources for the words you listed are:

  • What is the male equivalent of "damsel"?
  • Thesaurus.com: Old person synonyms
  • Macmillan Dictionary: Informal and insulting words for old people

I know that -Tor indicates a male while -trix denotes female.-Ette is french if I remember...

It appears that in the native french the masculine is -et and the feminine is -ette. Both meaning a smaller form of something else, for example a Cigarette is a smaller cigar. At some point English seemed to pick it up as a term meaning a feminine version of something else as well.