The part of grammar dealing with the inflection of words, especially how word endings change to show number, tense, case, and other grammatical features.
From Latin accidentia ('things that happen' or 'properties'). Medieval grammarians used this term for grammar rules that seemed to happen 'accidentally' to words rather than being essential to their meaning.
Medieval scholars called these grammar rules 'accidence' because the changing word endings seemed like accidents—imagine their surprise that languages had systems rather than just random variations!
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