inflection, in linguistics, the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender, mood, voice, and case. English inflection indicates noun plural (cat, cats), noun case (girl, girl’s, girls’), third person singular present tense (I, you, we, they buy; he buys), past tense (we walk, we walked), aspect (I have called, I am calling), and comparatives (big, bigger, biggest). Remnants of the earlier inflectional system of Old English may also be found (e.g., he, him, his). Changes within the stem, or main word part, are another type of inflection, as in sing, sang, sung and goose, geese. The paradigm of the Old Icelandic u-stem noun skjǫldr (“shield”), for example, includes forms with both internal change and suffixation; the nominative singular form is skjǫldr, the genitive singular is skjaldar, and the nominative plural is skildir. Many languages, such as Latin, Spanish, French, and German, have a much more extensive system of inflection. For example, Spanish shows verb distinction for person and number, “I, you, he, they live,” vivo, vives, vive, viven (“I live,” “you live,” “he lives,” “they live”). A number of languages, especially non-Indo-European ones, inflect with prefixes and infixes, word parts added before a main part or within the main part. Inflection differs from derivation in that it does not change the part of speech. Derivation uses prefixes and suffixes (e.g., in-, -tion) to form new words (e.g., inform, deletion), which can then take inflections.
The terms inflecting and inflectional are sometimes used more narrowly in the typological classification of languages to refer to a subtype of synthetic language, such as Latin. All synthetic languages have inflection in the broader and more widespread sense of the term.