Etymology

, perfect stem supplet-, + .

Noun

1. The supplying of something lacking.
2. 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”.
3. More loosely, 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.

Usage notes

Strictly speaking, in linguistics refers only to inflection, such as /, which are both adjectives, and this is the most frequent use. It is also used in the looser sense of semantic relations without etymological relations (or with distant etymological relations) such as /, where these are noun/adjective. However, this latter use is significantly less common and may be considered incorrect.