Sanamerkki

Sanamerkki is a term used in Finnish linguistics to describe a semantic marker attached to a word to indicate its core meanings or semantic properties. The word combines sana ('word') and merkki ('mark/sign'), and in theory it denotes a compact annotation that conveys information about a word's meaning category, semantic field, or typical referents.

In practice, sanamerkit are used in lexicography, corpus annotation, and natural language processing. A single word may carry several sanamerkit representing different aspects such as its semantic field (for example, animal, object, action), its typical referents, and any restrictions on usage or sense. In digital dictionaries or NLP pipelines, sanamerkki tags can support word sense disambiguation, semantic search, and improvements in machine translation by providing explicit semantic cues beyond surface form.

There is no universally standardized set of sanamerkit; the concept remains a topic in research and pilot annotation schemes rather than a widely adopted practice. It is closely related to established notions such as semantic features, word senses, semantic tagging, and lexical databases, offering a framework for attaching structured meaning information to words.