-eticsuff. Used to form adjectives usually from nouns ending in -esis, as in aphaeretic from aphaeresis.[Latin -eticus, from Greek -etikos, from -etos, verbal adj. suff.]American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.et?ic (??t ?k) adj. of or pertaining to the raw data of a language or other area of behavior, without considering the data as functional units within a system. Compare emic. [1950?55] -etic an adjective suffix, equivalent in meaning to -ic, occurring in loanwords from Greek (eidetic), and in a few analogous Latin or English formations (splenetic; phenetic). [