Erisanojen

Erisanojen is a Finnish term used in linguistics to refer to the distinct words of a language—the lexemes or headwords in a lexicon. The word erisana means “a different word,” and erisanojen denotes the corresponding plural or genitive usage. In practice, erisanojen are the canonical forms that carry core meaning and are used as the basis for dictionaries and linguistic analysis.

Erisanojen are differentiated from inflected, derived, or clitic forms of the same word. Inflected forms such as koiran (of the dog) or koiria (dogs) are surface variants of the erisana koira and are not counted as separate erisanojen in many linguistic analyses. This distinction helps linguists compare vocabulary at the level of underlying meaning rather than surface form.

In lexicography and natural language processing, erisanojen correspond to lemmas or dictionary headwords. Tokenization and lemmatization often reduce texts to their erisanojen to measure vocabulary size and semantic content, avoiding inflation from affixes and inflections.

Examples of erisanojen include common content words such as kissa (cat), koira (dog), and talo (house). Their inflected forms represent different surface realizations but belong to the same erisana.

See also: Lexeme, Lemma, Lexicography, Lemmatization.