Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Linguistics The use of an unrelated form to complete a paradigm, as the past tense went of the verb go, goes, going, gone.
Wiktionary
- n. The supplying of something lacking.
- n. The use of an unrelated word or phrase to supply inflected forms otherwise lacking, e.g. using “to be able” as the infinitive of “can”, or “better” as the comparative of “good”.
- n. More loosely, use of unrelated (or distantly related) words for semantically related words which may not share the same lexical category, such as father/paternal or cow/bovine.
Etymologies
- From Latin supplētus, past participle of supplēre, to supply; see supply.
Examples
“Other, more extreme cases of allomorphy are called suppletion, where two forms related by a morphological rule cannot be explained as being related on a phonological basis: for example, the past of go is went, which is a suppletive form.”
“Compared to other solutions regarding the origins of PIE's 1ps nominative pronoun and suppletion, this is the most explanatory and leaves nothing to mystery.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘suppletion’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...

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