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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

inflation.

An act, instance of, or state of expansion or increase in size, especially by injection of a gas or liquid.

9 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/General-American/ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃn̩/Received-Pronunciation
  1. An act, instance of, or state of expansion or increase in size, especially by injection of a gas or liquid.

    countable · uncountable
    The inflation of the balloon took five hours.
  2. An increase in the quantity of money, leading to a devaluation of existing money, adjusted for by way of higher nominal values.

    countable · uncountable
    Due to inflation, the monthly gym fee is rising by 10% from January.
  3. Undue expansion or increase, as of academic grades.

    countable · uncountable
  4. An extremely rapid expansion of the universe, theorized to have occurred very shortly after the Big Bang.

    countable · uncountable
Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁én Proto-Italic *en Proto-Italic *en- Latin in- Proto-Indo-European *bʰel- Proto-Indo-European *-eh₁- Proto-Indo-European *bʰleh₁-der. Proto-Italic *flāōder. Latin flō Latin īnflō Proto-Indo-European *-tis Proto-Indo-European *-Hō Proto-Indo-European *-tiHō Proto-Italic *-tiō Latin -tiō Latin īnflātiōbor. Old French inflationder. Middle English English inflation From Middle English, borrowed from Old French inflation (“swelling”), from Latin īnflātiō (“expansion", "blowing up”), from īnflātus, the perfect passive participle of īnflō (“blow into, expand”), from in (“into”) + flō (“blow”). By surface analysis, inflate + -ion.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.