Lemmá

Lemmá is a transliteration variant of a Greek term often written as λέμμα, used in multiple scholarly contexts to denote a unit such as a word, term, or entry. In many languages and disciplines, the standard English form is lemma, but lemmá appears in Greek-language texts and in cross‑linguistic discussions to reflect the original pronunciation and accent.

In linguistics and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical or base form under which related inflected or derived forms are grouped in dictionaries and databases. For example, the forms ran, runs, running all map to the same lemma, usually the verb’s bare form (run). The practice of identifying the lemma of a word is called lemmatization, a common preprocessing step in natural language processing and corpus linguistics.

In mathematics and logic, a lemma refers to a proven proposition used to establish a larger result or theorem. Lemmas serve as intermediate steps that simplify proofs and clarify the logical structure, rather than presenting the final claim on their own.

In botany, there is a distinct use of the term lemma (without accent in English) describing a bract that encloses the reproductive parts of a grass floret; this sense is etymologically related to the broader concept of an “item” or “part” of a larger whole, but it is separate from the linguistic meaning. The shared root reflects historical cross‑disciplinary borrowing from Greek.

Overall, lemmá highlights how a single term connects language, mathematics, and science as a label for a fundamental unit or stepping stone within a larger framework.