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. To cause to curve inwards.
- v. To change the tone or pitch of the voice when speaking or singing.
- v. To vary the form of a 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. 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
- v. vary the pitch of one's speech
- v. change the form of a word in accordance as required by the grammatical rules of the language
Etymologies
- Middle English inflecten, to bend down, from Latin īnflectere : in-, in; see in-2 + flectere, to bend.
Examples
“Just be careful how you inflect the acronym of that organization.”
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“They often use primitive weapons rocks, blunt objects and machetes to conserve their limited munitions and inflect maximum brutality.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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djsalinger "Aloha means goodbye, and also hello. It is in how you inflect..."
S. Malkmus Mar 12, 2009