In
linguistics and
etymology,
suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the
inflected form of another word when the two words are not
cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". The term "suppletion" implies that a gap in the paradigm was filled by a form "supplied" by a different paradigm. Instances of suppletion are overwhelmingly restricted to the most commonly used
lexical items in a language.