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o deflect; to curve; to bow. Are they [the rays of the sun] not reflected, refracted, and inflected by one and the same principle Sir I. Newton.

Having inflections; capable of, or subject to, inflection; inflective. Inflected cycloid (Geom.), a prolate cycloid. See Cycloid.

The act of inflecting, or the state of being inflected.

Of or pertaining to inflection; having, or characterized by, inflection. Max Müller.

Capable of, or pertaining to, inflection; deflecting; as, the inflective quality of the air. Derham.

Not admitting of, or characterized by, inflection.

The accidents, of inflections of words; the rudiments of grammar. Milton.

To give an acute sound to; as, he acutes his rising inflection too much. [R.] Walker.

In agglutinative languages the union of words may be compared to mechanical compounds, in inflective languages to chemical compounds. R. Morris. Cf. man-kind, heir-loom, war-like, which are agglutinative compounds. The Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, the Tamul, etc., are agglutinative languages. R. Morris. Agglutinative l…

of words to the genius, structure, or general rules of a language; similarity of origin, inflection, or principle of pronunciation, and the like, as opposed to pl. analogies. Johnson.

hetic. Analytical or coördinate geometry. See under Geometry. -- Analytic language, a noninflectional language or one not characterized by grammatical endings. -- Analytical table (Nat. Hist.), a table in which the characteristics of the species or other groups are arranged so as to facilitate the determination of th…

Having lost, or tending to lose, inflections by phonetic decay; as, anaptotic languages.

Pertaining to, or characterized by, aptotes; uninflected; as, aptotic languages.

To cause to deviate from straightness; to bend; to inflect; to make crooked or curved. We bow things the contrary way, to make them come to their natural straightness. Milton. The whole nation bowed their necks to the worst kind of tyranny. Prescott.

One of the forms, or the inflections or changes of form, of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, which indicate its relation to other words, and in the aggregate constitute its declension; the relation which a noun or pronoun sustains to some other word. Case is properly a falling off from the nominative or first state of wo…

To inflect according to the degrees of comparison; to state positive, comparative, and superlative forms of; as, most adjectives of one syllable are compared by affixing "-er" and "-est" to the positive form; as, black, blacker, blackest; those of more than one syllable are usually compared by prefixing "more" and "mos…

The modification, by inflection or otherwise, which the adjective and adverb undergo to denote degrees of quality or quantity; as, little, less, least, are examples of comparison.

To inflect (a verb), or give in order the forms which it assumed in its several voices, moods, tenses, numbers, and persons.

The act of conjugating a verb or giving in order its various parts and inflections.

Inflection of nouns, adjectives, etc., according to the grammatical cases.