The choice of -able vs
-ible is horrendous. It defeats even me.
Compressible or
compressable?
Collectible or
collectable? There are some rules, and there is some guidance for when there are no rules. In the above two cases you can use either. And I'm not going to make you learn any
Latin.
We actually have three endings:
- -able from Latin -abilis (muto 'I change' --> mutabilis 'changeable, mutable')
- -ible from Latin -ibilis (credo 'I believe' --> credibilis 'believable, credible')
- English able used as a suffix: breakable, un-put-down-able
First we'll dispose of some easy cases.
Where the word has no pretensions at all of coming from Latin, use -able. That's the third case above.
Where the preceding consonant changes, that's pretty much a guarantee you've got a Latin word that takes -ible. This is because of a thing in Latin grammar that you don't need to know about. Really, you don't. The consonant change is enough of a sign. Here are some examples.
Now, so far the examples have been based on verbs:
breakable is from
break,
permissible is from
permit, and so on. Where the Latin
verb has not been borrowed into English, it seems they all take
-ible. I won't swear to its being all, and I can't strictly justify this in Latin grammar, but it holds for many common ones:
audible,
visible,
horrible,
terrible,
edible,
possible, and so on. There are no English verbs that these come from, no words *aud, *vis, *horr, *ed.
If you like, you can take the previous case as more examples of this: there are no English verbs *comprehens or *permiss either. And also fallible, where there isn't a word *fall with that vowel.
That leaves a large number of pairs like collapsable/collapsible, collectable/collectible, exhaustable/exhaustible, connectible/connectable, and so on and so on, where they both look right (or wrong) no matter how long you stare at them. There are two ways of approaching this. Three ways.
- Decide it isn't important and write whatever you like.
- Look them up again and try to memorize them. (This is what I do and I can't get it to work.)
- Bear in mind that any English verb is allowed to take the English suffix -able. So even if expressible is the better Latin, you are allowed to coin the word expressable.
There is one rule for the
negative. The pure Latin ending
-ible ought to take the Latin negative
in-, not the native English
un-. So
inaudible,
invisible,
incomprehensible,
indefensible, and so on. This can even help to decide on the ending: do you say unexhaustable or
inexhaustible? The second, of course, so it's Latin with
-ible.
The above are rules of thumb only. They work in the majority of cases, and will not lead you to too many howlers.
One example of the rules failing is gullible, which is from a native English word, not Latin, but has -ible.