noun
1. Economics . a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency ( opposed to deflation ).
2. the act of inflating.
3. the state of being inflated.
Dictionary.com does a pretty good job of defining what inflation actually means, I should point out that I suspect a lot of people are following what they learned in school history which is a form of neo-keynesian economics which I of course think is a load of bullshit, people who believe in the neo-keynesian field are often guilty of outright making up words and ignoring mathematics to try and confuse people, look at words like Quantitative Easing as an example.

Be suspicious of everything, question everything.