Termhood

Termhood is a concept in linguistics and terminology studies that denotes the degree to which a lexical item functions as a term within a particular domain. A term is a word or multiword expression that names a concept, phenomenon, process, or object in a specialized field. Termhood thus captures how specialized an item is to professional discourse, and how conventional its use has become among domain experts. General vocabulary typically shows low termhood, while domain-specific terminology displays higher termhood.

Termhood is studied in contrast to general wordhood and is used to identify candidates for terminologies in corpora. Researchers assess termhood by examining how strongly a form is associated with a domain, using measures such as domain-specific frequency, distribution across documents, and cohesion with other domain terms. Statistical approaches include term frequency in a domain corpus, inverse document frequency with respect to a general corpus, and combinations that yield a termhood score. Multiword expressions are common and often bear higher termhood than single words.

Applications include automatic term extraction for building glossaries, terminologies, and ontologies; development of domain dictionaries; and improved information retrieval and text mining in specialized fields. High-termhood items help users locate relevant documents and concepts within a field, while low-termhood items may indicate general language or cross-disciplinary terms.

Termhood is context-dependent and dynamic; technical advances or cross-disciplinary use can raise or lower a term's status. It is therefore an appraisal rather than an intrinsic property of the word itself, requiring transparent criteria and domain-aware evaluation.