Orðsforms

Orðsforms, or word forms, are the various surface realizations of a word that express grammatical information. Each form results from the interaction between a word's lemma (its dictionary form) and the grammar of the language. The term is used in many languages to distinguish a word's underlying form from its inflected or derived variants.

Forms arise through inflection, derivation, or compounding. Inflection modifies a word to encode grammatical categories such as tense, number, mood, voice, case, gender, or person. For example, in English the verb walk has forms walk, walks, walked, walking, indicating present third-person singular, past tense, and the present participle. The noun cat has forms cat and cats, indicating singular and plural. In highly inflected languages, nouns may carry case and gender markings, and verbs may encode extensive combinations of tense, aspect, mood, voice, number, and person.

Languages differ in how many forms they require. Analytic or isolating languages employ few inflected endings, while synthetic or agglutinative languages generate large form inventories through affixes and alternations. Some forms are irregular or suppletive, where entirely different roots or stems appear across forms (for example better in English).

In practice, orðsforms matter for dictionaries, language teaching, and computational linguistics. Morphology tools analyze a given form to identify its lemma and grammatical features or generate the appropriate form from a lemma and feature set. Understanding word forms supports parsing, translation, search, and language learning.