a typical example or pattern of something; a pattern or model

society's paradigm of the ‘ideal woman’

a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles

English determiners form a paradigm: we can say ‘a book’ or ‘his book’ but not ‘a his book’

(in the traditional grammar of Latin, Greek, and other inflected languages) a table of all the inflected forms of a particular verb, noun, or adjective, serving as a model for other words of the same conjugation or declension