lemma

Canonical representation of a lexeme

EntityQ18514

Also known as headword · dictionary form · canonical form · citation form · head word

Subclass of: word form

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

In morphology and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme; however, break is the lemma under which each form thereof is indexed. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Russian. The process of determining the lemma for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary.

Overview

All data

17 statements · 29% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Different from: lemma
Wiktionary lemma
Said to be the same as: uninflected word
nominal form
headword

On other databases

10 identifiers linking lemma across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

29%

externally sourced

Source last edited October 13, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). lemma (Q18514). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/lemma-Q18514