Question: How Is "-miento" Used?
Can you tell me anything about -miento? Why it is added to some words i.e., estacionamiento, encarcelamiento, casamiento. Please give me some history about this?
Answer:
The -miento suffix in Spanish is the equivalent of the English suffix "-ment." They both come from the Latin -mentum and are suffixes generally used to turn verbs into nouns.
Socasamiento (wedding) is a noun form of casar (to marry), encarcelamiento (imprisonment) is a noun form of encarceler (to imprison), apartamiento (separation) is a noun form of apartar (to part or separate), and so on. We do the same thing in English with words such as "establishment" (a noun form of "to establish") and "imprisonment" (a noun form of "to imprison").
