dictionarylemma

A dictionarylemma is the canonical form of a word used as the headword or lemma in a dictionary entry. It is the form under which inflected or derived forms are grouped, indexed, and linked to their meanings. In lexicography and natural language processing, the dictionarylemma serves as the reference form for lookup, sense disambiguation, and linguistic analysis.

In practice, a dictionarylemma is chosen for each lemma across parts of speech. For nouns, it is typically the base form, such as the singular nominative; for verbs, the infinitive or citation form; for adjectives, the positive form. Some languages may have multiple lemmas for a single word depending on sense or POS, and the choice of lemma can reflect how a word behaves morphologically in that language.

Examples illustrate the relationship between inflected forms and the dictionarylemma. In English, the forms run, runs, running, and ran map to the lemma run; the forms better and best map to the lemma good in many dictionaries. In languages with richer morphology, such as Spanish or German, inflected forms like hablo, hablas, habló, and hablaba all map to the lemma hablar; gehen maps to the lemma gehen in German dictionaries.

In computational linguistics, lemmatization is the process of producing the dictionarylemma from an input word form, using a morphological analyzer and dictionary resources. This differs from stemming, which reduces a word to a root form that may not be a valid dictionary lemma.

Dictionarylemmas are foundational to dictionary compilation, corpus indexing, and lexical databases, supporting accurate retrieval and cross-referencing of word senses across contexts.