The Etymology of Inflate
Inflate is a transparent Latin compound. The Latin verb inflāre joined the prefix in- (into) with flāre (to blow), giving the literal sense of blowing something into a container or body — a bladder, a balloon, a lung. The participle inflātus passed through medical and rhetorical Latin into 15th-century English, where it kept its physical meaning. By the 17th century the verb had developed a busy figurative life: to inflate a reputation, an estimate, an account. The economic sense — to inflate the currency, monetary inflation — was technical jargon by the late 19th century and became universal vocabulary in the 20th. The Latin root flāre descends from Proto-Indo-European *bʰleh₁- (to blow), one of the most productive sound-imitative roots of the family. Its English descendants by direct inheritance include blow itself and bladder; through Latin loans it gives flatulence, deflate, conflate, and souffler-derived French borrowings like soufflé.