Suppletion
linguistic process in which inflections of etymologically unrelated stems come to be treated as the inflected forms of the same lexeme
In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognates. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". For example, go:went is a suppletive paradigm, because go and went are not etymologically related, whereas mouse:mice is irregular but not suppletive, since the two words come from the same Old English ancestor.
The term "suppletion" implies that a gap in the paradigm was filled by a form "supplied" by a different paradigm. Instances of suppletion are overwhelmingly restricted to the most commonly used lexical items in a language.
Irregularity and suppletion
An irregular paradigm is one in which the derived forms of a word cannot be deduced by simple rules from the base form. For example, someone who knows only a little English can deduce that the plural of girl is girls but cannot deduce that the plural of man is men. Language learners are often most aware of irregular verbs, but any part of speech with inflections can be irregular.
For most synchronic purposes—first-language acquisition studies, psycholinguistics, language-teaching theory—it suffices to note that these forms are irregular. However, historical linguistics seeks to explain how they came to be so and distinguishes different kinds of irregularity according to their origins.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q324982. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Suppletion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.