dictionaryforms

Dictionary form refers to the canonical base form of a word that is used as the headword in dictionaries and as the reference form from which other inflected forms are derived. It is also known as the lemma or citation form. The dictionary form is chosen to represent a word’s core meaning and its most basic grammatical shape.

In most languages, inflected forms—such as those indicating tense, number, case, or mood—are produced from the dictionary form. For example, from the English base forms go and eat, one can derive goes, going, went, and eaten. The relationship between a word’s dictionary form and its inflections is central to morphosyntactic analysis and lexicography.

The concept of a dictionary form is closely linked to the idea of a lemma. A lemma is the abstract form that stands for a set of related word forms in the language’s lexicon. In English, the lemma for various inflected forms is typically the base verb or singular noun, though the exact choice can vary by dictionary conventions. In languages with rich inflection, a single lemma may cover many surface forms, while some languages use multiple lemmas for related words (for instance, irregular verbs that map to different stems).

Applications of dictionary forms include organizing lexicographic entries, enabling efficient search and indexing, and powering natural language processing tasks such as lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging. By reducing words to their dictionary forms, systems can compare tokens across different grammatical forms and identify underlying meanings.