Fashions in literature run not only to theme, form, influence, and diction but also to title and even part of a title. For a century following the Dunciad an extraordinary number of productions had titles ending in -iad (-ead, -ad, -ade). The presence of this suffix denoted that the work dealt with the subject suggested by the name to which those final letters were affixed. The NED gives the English suffix -ad as representing the Greek -άδ-α, forming feminine patronymics and hence used in names of poems. The mere -ad did not often appear but yielded to the more euphonious -iad and sometimes -ead; the -ade was the French spelling.