Inflation is prices rising across an economy so that money buys less. High inflation, the inflation rate, inflation is falling.
The rate is a percentage over a year, measured against a basket of goods, and a falling rate means prices are still rising more slowly rather than coming down. Deflation is the opposite and is generally worse. Hyperinflation is the catastrophic version. Note inflationary; and that inflation also has its literal sense of blowing something up, which is where the economic metaphor comes from.
1nouninflationA general rise in prices so that money buys less.
“Inflation ran at about eleven per cent for two years.”
inflation is a rise in prices.
Latin inflatio means a blowing up or swelling, from inflare — in- plus flare, to blow. The economic sense is a nineteenth-century American metaphor about the money supply being blown up like a balloon.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰleh₁-
Old French
inflation — swelling
English, today
inflation
Built from
From Middle English -, from Old French inflation (“swelling”). From Middle English -, borrowed from Old French inflation (“swelling”), from Latin īnflātiō (“expansion", "blowing up”), from īnflātus, the perfect passive participle of īnflō (“blow into, expand”), from in (“into”) + flō (“blow”). by surface analysis, inflate + -ion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA