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PlainSpell

inflect

/ɪnˈflɛkt/verb

inflect is a verb meaning “To cause to curve inwards” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled I-N-F-L-E-C-T, and it appears about once in every 22 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does inflect mean?

verb

  1. 1

    To cause to curve inwards.

  2. 2

    To change the tone or pitch of the voice when speaking or singing.

    The actress has a great skill of being able to inflect her voice to any situation.

  3. 3

    To vary the form of a word to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc.

  4. 4

    To be varied in the form to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc.

    In Latin, adjectives and nouns inflect a lot, but inflection is minimally found in Modern English.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce inflect?

  • /ɪnˈflɛkt/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-inflect.ogg, En-au-inflect.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of inflect

  • inflects present, singular, he/she/it
  • inflecting participle, present
  • inflected participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is inflect?

Inflect appears about once in every 22 million words in written English, the 141,699th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Inflect in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Spanishmodular (music: change tone or pitch), conjugar, declinar, inflexionar (grammar: vary the form of a word)
Frenchinfléchir (grammar: vary the form of a word)
Germanflektieren, beugen (grammar: vary the form of a word)
Portuguesevariar, flexionar (grammar: vary the form of a word)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does inflect come from?

From Latin īnflectō, from in- (“in”) + flectō (“to bend”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).