Definition & Meaning of "declension"

What is "declension"?

Declension is a grammatical process in which nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and sometimes articles change their form to express different grammatical categories such as case, number, and gender. This process helps indicate the role of a word in a sentence, such as whether it is a subject, object, or possessive. For example, in Latin, the noun "puella," meaning "girl," can change to "puellae" for the genitive case, meaning "of the girl." In English, declension is less prominent but can be seen in pronouns, such as "I," used as a subject, "me," used as an object, and "my," used for possession. Understanding declension is important for analyzing how different languages convey meaning through word forms and their relationships in sentences.