Suppletion

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The phenomenon in language where one word replaces an expected inflected form with an entirely different root for grammatical variations, typically seen in irregular verb or noun forms
2. A linguistic process in which distinct lexical roots are used instead of regular inflectional endings to express different grammatical categories within a single paradigm
3. The occurrence of morphological substitution where unrelated base forms appear in place of regular conjugation or declension patterns to convey tense, number, or case distinctions

Etymology: Suppletion is a grammatical term, and its history begins in Latin. The verb "supplēre" meant "to fill up" or "to supply," and its past-participle stem "supplet-" carried that sense into the noun-forming suffix "-ion," giving the sense of a filling-in. The word reached English through German, where "Suppletivwesen" was used for the phenomenon in which a missing form of a word is filled by a different word altogether. The core idea is that a grammatical paradigm sometimes has a gap that another, unrelated word fills. English "go" and "went" are a familiar example: "went" is historically the past tense of the unrelated verb "wend," so the paradigm of "go" has been supplied from elsewhere. The same logic explains "good" and "better," or "be" and "was."

Synonyms: irregular inflection, suppletive form

Antonyms: regular inflection