in Grammar, the arranging and connecting the words of a sentence according to the rules of the language. See Grammar and Language.

The construction is generally more simple, easy, and direct in the modern than in the ancient tongues. We have very few of those inversions which occasion so much embarrassment and obscurity in the Latin, and our thoughts are usually delivered in the same order in which the imagination conceives them. The nominative case, for instance, generally precedes the verb, and the verb goes before the oblique cases which it governs. Yet English admits of considerable inversion, as may be seen by the first sentence of Paradise Lost.