Meaning & use

inflectional ending

noun·Academic

A suffix added to a word to show grammatical information such as tense, number, or comparison.

See it in a sentence

The '-ed' in 'walked' is an inflectional ending that marks the past tense.

Adding the inflectional ending '-s' to 'cat' shows that there is more than one.

A note on using this word

Inflectional endings change a word's grammar, not its meaning, unlike derivational suffixes such as '-ness.'

Words with a similar meaning

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