bestattested

Bestattested is an adjective used in linguistics and philology to describe a form, lemma, or feature that has the strongest available evidence across sources. A bestattested form is not merely the most common in a corpus; it is the form for which the quantity, quality, and diversity of evidence are greatest, spanning multiple independent texts, dialects, or time periods. The designation is relative: what is bestattested within a given language and dataset may differ from another, and new data can alter the assessment.

Criteria typically include the number of independent attestations, the reliability of the sources, and the geographic or temporal spread of evidence. Researchers may weigh manuscript authority, editorial quality, and the risk of scribal or orthographic variation, as well as the representativeness of samples. In lexicography and historical linguistics, identifying the bestattested form helps anchor reconstructions, establish headwords, or support semantic and phonological analyses.

Limitations include attestation bias, gaps for extinct languages, and orthographic shifts that obscure underlying forms. Bestattested status is a methodological judgment rather than an absolute property of the data, and it should be revisited as new sources become available.

See also: Attestation, Corpus linguistics, Historical linguistics, Lexicography.