Dictionaryform

Dictionaryform, often written as dictionary form or lemma, refers to the canonical base form of a word that is used as the headword in dictionaries and lexical databases. It is the form from which other inflected or derived forms are created. The exact shape of the dictionaryform depends on the language: in many languages it is the base or lemma, while in others it is a specific non-inflected form used for dictionary entries.

In practice, the dictionaryform serves as the reference form for a word. In English, the dictionaryform is typically the base verb form, as in go, eat, be; these forms yield its inflected variants such as goes, went, going, eaten. In Japanese, the dictionaryform of a verb is the non-past dictionary form, such as taberu (to eat) or kaku (to write). Adjectives and nouns also have dictionaryforms that function as the entry form for lookup.

The dictionaryform is essential in linguistic analysis, language learning, and information retrieval. It aligns with the concept of a lemma, the abstract dictionary entry representing all inflected forms of a word. In natural language processing, lemmatization maps inflected or derived forms back to their dictionaryform for consistent indexing, searching, and normalization. Some languages feature irregular inflection or multiple lemmas for different senses, and the exact dictionaryform can vary by part of speech or semantic context.