the.com/accidence
the boring-sounding cousin of grammar that's really the rulebook for how words shapeshift
means The branch of grammar dealing with the inflections of words — how nouns, verbs, and the like change their form to signal things like tense, number, gender, and case.
from From the Latin 'accidentia,' meaning 'things that happen' or 'non-essential properties,' itself from 'accidere,' to befall or happen to (the same root that gives us 'accident'). To old grammarians, the changing endings of a word were its 'accidents' — the variable bits that 'happen' to it without altering its essence. The word slipped into English through the medieval study of Latin grammar, where it picked up an extra 'c' partly by confusion with 'accident' itself.
- not accident
- Means word inflection, no spilled coffee involved
- latin roots
- From accidentia, 'things that happen to' words
- old school
- Was once a standalone subject in English schools
- grammar slice
- Covers endings, cases, tenses, plurals, conjugations
- living term
- Still used by linguists describing morphology today
english accidence — historical grammar term covering inflectional changes in old and middle english, documented in works like the oed since the 1600s
latin accidence — the declension and conjugation systems of latin, taught in classical grammar since roman times