Suffixes are not words, but endings tagged on to words. -tion -ly -ment -ness None of these mean anything by themselves; they are not discrete words. specific is a word, an adjective. "Gender-specific" is a compound adjective, an adjective formed by combining two words (adj-adj, adj-noun, noun-verb) Other examples: age-old -- two adjectives a ten-year mortgage - adj-noun man-eating tiger - noun-verb

A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme