In language matters, inflection (the American spelling; inflexion is British) has two meanings—the general sense “tone of voice” (There was a doubtful inflection in his voice) and the technical one for grammar that refers to the process of adding grammatical suffixes (the suffixes themselves are inflections) to nouns to specify number and case (dog plus -s becomes dogs; plus apostrophe plus -s, it becomes dog’s, the genitive singular), to verbs to indicate tense or number (sign plus -ed becomes signed; sign plus -s becomes signs), and to other words for other grammatical or semantic purposes (such as the -er added to the end of bright to form the comparative of the adjective or the -ly tacked on to some adjectives to make them into adverbs (brightly, for example). See SPELLING (1).
