Word.ws English Dictionary

suppletions

suppletions is the plural of suppletion.

Meaning of suppletion

Noun

suppletion (usually uncountable, plural suppletions)

  1. (usually) The supplying of something lacking.
  2. (usually) The use of an unrelated word or phrase to supply inflected forms otherwise lacking, e.g. using “to be able” as the infinitive of “can”, or “better” as the comparative of “good”, or “went” as the simple past of “go”.
  3. (usually) More loosely, the use of unrelated (or distantly related) words for semantically related words which may not share the same lexical category, such as father/paternal or cow/bovine, normally referred to as collateral adjectives.

Questions about suppletions

What is suppletions the plural of?
Suppletions is the plural of suppletion.

Words near suppletions in the dictionary

  1. supplete
  2. suppleted
  3. suppletes
  4. suppleting
  5. suppletion
  6. suppletions
  7. suppletive
  8. suppletively
  9. suppletiveness
  10. suppletives
  11. suppletivism

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: suppletions (page history and authors); suppletion (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “suppletions.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/suppletions. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.