verb ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Verb

1. 1
   To cause to curve inwards. transitive
2. 2
   vary the pitch of one's speech wordnet
3. 3
   To change the tone or pitch of the voice when speaking or singing. transitive

   "The actress has a great skill of being able to inflect her voice to any situation."

4. 4
   change the form of a word in accordance as required by the grammatical rules of the language wordnet
5. 5
   To vary the form of a word to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc. transitive

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6. 6
   To be varied in the form to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc. intransitive

   "In Latin, adjectives and nouns inflect a lot, but inflection is minimally found in Modern English."

Synonyms

All synonyms

analyzearchbendbend backbowbracket

Example

More examples

"'That' has only the two cases, nominative and objective, and it does not inflect depending on the case."

Etymology

From Latin īnflectō, from in- (“in”) + flectō (“I bend”).

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.