Sanakirjapäämuotona

Sanakirjapäämuotona is a term used in lexicography to denote the form of a word that is chosen as the canonical or citation form for dictionary entries. It corresponds to the lemma, the base form from which inflected forms are generated and around which the entry is organized. The headword is the form readers use when looking up the word and is used for alphabetical ordering in the dictionary.

The choice of sanakirjapäämuotona is language dependent and reflects conventional practice in dictionaries. In Finnish, for example, the noun's headword is typically the nominative singular form (talo, talot), the verb's headword is the infinitive (kirjoittaa), and the adjective's headword is the positive singular form (pieni). Some languages or dictionaries may treat certain derivatives, participles, or multiword expressions as the headword or provide multiple representative headwords.

In lexicographic works, the headword is accompanied by a set of inflected forms or a reference to morphological rules showing how the word changes across cases, numbers, voice, mood, tense, etc. Digital dictionaries and NLP tools also rely on the sanakirjapäämuotona concept to perform lemmatization, search, and linguistic analysis, mapping inflected or derived forms to the underlying headword.

Overall, sanakirjapäämuotona is a practical and foundational concept in lexicography, enabling consistent indexing, retrieval, and representation of word forms across languages.