Suppletion

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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". For example, go:went is a suppletive paradigm, because go and went are not etymologically related, whereas mouse:mice is irregular but not suppletive, since the two words come from the same Old English ancestor.

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.