Pääsana

Pääsana is a term used in lexicography and linguistics to denote the headword or lemma of a lexical entry. Derived from Finnish, where pää means head or main and sana means word, the concept describes the canonical form of a word from which inflected or derived forms are generated. The pääsana serves as the entry’s primary reference form and is the form under which the word is alphabetically indexed and cited in dictionaries and lexical databases.

In practical use, the pääsana functions as the anchor of an entry. It is the form often shown at the top of a dictionary entry and may be highlighted or set apart in print or digital formats. Inflected forms, variants, and related words are linked to the pääsana, allowing users to navigate between different morphologies of the same lemma. For verbs, the pääsana is typically the citation form used for listing conjugations; for nouns and adjectives, it is usually the base or singular form.

In computational linguistics and natural language processing, the pääsana corresponds to the lemma or canonical form used in lemmatization and morphological analysis. It provides the stable reference point for indexing, search, and linguistic annotation, enabling consistent treatment of words across different inflections and languages.

See also: lemma, headword, canonical form. Notes: terminology can vary between languages and lexical traditions, but the underlying idea remains the same—a single representative form of a word used for reference and organization.