Inflection
In grammar,
inflection or
inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case. The inflection of verbs is also called
conjugation, and the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns is also called
declension. An inflection expresses one or more grammatical categories with a prefix, suffix or infix, or another internal modification such as a vowel change. For example, the Latin verb
ducam, meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix
-am, expressing person, number, and tense. The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word
lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb. The inflected form of a word often contains both a free morpheme, and a bound morpheme. For example, the English word
cars is a noun that is inflected for number, specifically to express the plural; the content morpheme
car is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while the suffix
-s is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word.