The act or process of fastening or attaching one thing to another, especially in grammar where smaller word parts are joined to a root word.
From Latin affixus, past participle of affigere (ad- 'to' + figere 'to fix'). The -ion suffix creates a noun indicating an action or process. First used in English in the 17th century as a grammatical term.
Affixion is why we can transform 'happy' into 'unhappy' or 'happiness'—by attaching prefixes and suffixes, we multiply a language's vocabulary without inventing entirely new words. This system lets humans create thousands of related words from a smaller base.
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