inflection

Inflection refers to the way words change form to express different grammatical information, such as tense, number, mood, or case. For example, in English, adding "-ed" to "walk" to form "walked" indicates past tense, while changing "child" to "children" shows plural. These variations help convey specific meanings and relationships between words within sentences. Inflection is common in many languages and allows for more precise communication without changing the core word meaning.