The Vestigial Trace of Old French -é in English words

This sheet contains a dataset of 62 common English words ending with the suffix -ee in alphabetical order. The suffix has been adopted from Old French -é. By and large, English does not allow for the stress to be assigned onto the suffix, but the suffix -ee uniquely receives the stress. Yates (2019) reminds the present author that main stress could change onto the inflectional suffix in Indo-European languages; English affiliates to the Germanic branch of Indo-European (Hogg 2011). The following data has been manually collected from Random House Webster Merriam College Dictionary (2005) and Collins Online Dictionary (2021) so that the nature of accentual mobility can be studied in the English words (cf. Kiparsky 1973).