Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To alter (the voice) in tone or pitch; modulate.
- v. Grammar To alter (a word) by inflection.
- v. To turn from a course or a specified alignment; bend.
- v. Grammar To be modified by inflection.
- v. Grammar To give all of the inflected forms of a word; to provide a paradigm.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To bend; turn from a direct line or course.
- In grammar, to vary, as a noun or verb, by change of form, especially in regard to endings; decline, as a noun or adjective, or conjugate, as a verb; more specifically, to denote a change of office in (words), not by added elements only, but more or less by alteration of the stem or root itself.
- To modulate, as the voice.
- To receive inflection; undergo grammatical changes of form.
Wiktionary
- v. transitive To cause to curve inwards.
- v. transitive, music To change the tone or pitch of the voice when speaking or singing.
- v. transitive, grammar To vary the form of word to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To turn from a direct line or course; to bend; to incline, to deflect; to curve; to bow.
- v. (Gram.) To vary, as a noun or a verb in its terminations; to decline, as a noun or adjective, or to conjugate, as a verb.
- v. To modulate, as the voice.
WordNet 3.0
Etymologies
- From Latin īnflectō, from in- ("in") + flectō ("I bend") (Wiktionary)
- Middle English inflecten, to bend down, from Latin īnflectere : in-, in; see in-2 + flectere, to bend. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Just be careful how you inflect the acronym of that organization.”
The Volokh Conspiracy » Harold Koh Statements on Drone Warfare at ASIL Tonight
“They often use primitive weapons rocks, blunt objects and machetes to conserve their limited munitions and inflect maximum brutality.”
The Huffington Post: Jedidiah Jenkins: Obama Made the Right Decision in Africa, Here's Why...
“With a title like Colonel Blimp, it's assumed the film is concerned solely with matters of men and war, but it's frequently Kerr's performances that inflect it with layers of emotion and romance.”
“We never forget we are in a single small town, thinking our way through the particular names, histories and legends that inflect its thought.”
“The company coached the new voice actress to inflect her voice in the same way that an experienced customer-service representative would and rewrote her script to sound similar to a live agent.”
“Shameful that so-called journalists these days always have to inflect their own opinion and/or emotions into stories.”
“If I could inflect pain, I inflicted it to the max," Gore declared, describing how he had scalped several victims to satisfy a hair fetish.”
The Huffington Post: Pete Earley: A Serial Killer 'Talks' Too Much, May Speed Up His Own Execution
“By raising the discipline of architecture's capacity to negotiate these successfully at home, and allow a new consciousness of the intersections between race and class to inflect design with social science and social theory, than we can realize an enlightened sense of what is possible in South America and Latin America as they face many of the same challenges that our cities faced in the early twentieth century.”
“He predicted that a Labor government would increase the tax with Greens support and inflect greater damage to Australia's most important export industry.”
“You see, in northern Minnesota where I grew up, people use this expression all the time, but they do not inflect it with passion or zeal.”
The Huffington Post: Kristin M. Swenson, Ph.D.: That Glenn Beck, He's Really Quite Something
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘inflect’.
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
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bad memory
copper, anvil, oblique, thrust, shrine, welfare, farewell, bitter, faction, sectarian, tangible, spectacle and 134 more...
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That's right, another list
muck-a-muck, ipse dixit, solipsism, anticlinal, analogical, amoral, alogical, synclinal, disinclined, iconological, studly, flitch and 179 more...
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Interesting words
ineffable, effable, immutable, amorphous, parochial, salient, ascertain, circumspect, congenial, coeval, aversion, edification and 117 more...
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Umbersorrow
Intangible, anthropic.
States of being are listed on oofy.njiju, glark, deplore, afterlithe, tagmass, spuriosity, forkful, chelation, oding, ploat, botnet, quedeship and 477 more...
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Yours, Sincerely
Here are some more words. I shall try and think of some I actually like. This is not something I can think about easily, my vocabulary is not accessible to me most of the time, but comes out in sud...
unlaugh, cute, heteronormative, cellar door, morouge, a monk swimming, rust, inflect, glamor, breve, logarithm, pop and 1 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for inflect.
djsalinger "Aloha means goodbye, and also hello. It is in how you inflect..."
S. Malkmus Mar 12, 2009