Typewoord

Typewoord is a theoretical construct used in linguistics and natural language processing to denote a canonical word form together with its linguistic features, serving as the abstract unit that corresponds to word tokens in a text. A typewoord represents a single word type, typically identified by its lemma and its standard orthography, and it carries information such as part of speech, morphological paradigm, and, in some analyses, semantic or syntactic behavior. The term blends the Dutch words type and woord (word) and is employed in discussions of lexicons, corpora, and language models where distinguishing between unique word forms (types) and their surface realizations (tokens) is important.

In practice, a typewoord entry may include fields such as orthography, lemma, part of speech, morphological features, and a frequency estimate. For example, a typewoord for the Dutch verb lopen might have orthography lopen, lemma lopen, pos verb, and a morphological paradigm including loop, loopt, liep, liepen, gelopen. A noun typewoord like huis would have orthography huis, lemma huis, pos noun, plural huizen, and a frequency score.

The concept is commonly used in corpus linguistics, computational lexicography, and language modeling to study vocabulary diversity, type-token distributions, and lexicon size. While widely used in theory, the exact definition and scope of a typewoord can vary between authors and languages, and some communities prefer the related term woordtype or simply type.

See also: type-token distinction, word type, word token, lemma, lexicon, corpus linguistics, morphology.