a grammatical construction in which the inflection or form of a word is conditioned by the meaning rather than the syntax, as for example the plural form have with the singular noun group in the sentence the group have already assembled
WordReference Random House Unabridged Dictionary of American English © 2025
syn•e•sis
(sin′ə sis),USA pronunciation n.
Grammara construction in which an expected grammatical agreement in form is replaced by an agreement in meaning, as in The crowd rose to their feet, where a plural pronoun is used to refer to a singular noun.
- Greek sýnesis understanding, intelligence, equivalent. to syn- syn- + (h)e- (stem of hiénai to throw, send) + -sis -sis
- Neo-Latin
- 1890–95
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