inflection
- 01 C1 Advanced
a change in the ending or form of a word to show things like tense or number.
the morphological process by which a word is modified to express grammatical categories such as tense, mood, person, or number.
Simple“In English, adding '-ed' to a verb is a common inflection to show the past tense.”
In context“Highly inflected languages like Latin or Russian rely on word endings rather than word order to convey grammatical relationships within a sentence.”
UsageOften used as an uncountable noun when referring to the general linguistic concept.
Synonyms - 02 B2 Upper Intermediate
a change in the pitch or loudness of your voice while you are speaking.
a modulation of the voice; a change in pitch or tone that conveys meaning or emotion.
Simple“She noticed a slight inflection of sadness in his voice when he mentioned home.”
In context“The actor used subtle inflections to signal sarcasm without changing the literal meaning of the script.”
SynonymsAntonyms - 03 C2 Proficiency
a point where a curve changes its direction.
a change in the curvature of a line from concave to convex or vice versa.
Simple“The graph shows a clear inflection point where the growth starts to slow down.”
In context“The engineer identified the point of inflection on the structural beam to determine where the stress was most concentrated.”
UsageCommonly appears in the fixed phrase 'inflection point'.
Usage inflection point
“To Brooke Erin Duffy, a communication professor at Cornell University, these college programs represent an inflection point.”
From older inflexion, borrowed from Middle French inflexion, itself borrowed from Latin inflexiōnem (“alteration”, literally “bending”). The English spelling with ⟨ct⟩ is due to influence from inflect or related words like correction.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.