diktionaarimuoto

Diktionaarimuoto, or dictionary form, is the canonical form of a word that dictionaries treat as the headword or lemma. It is the form under which the word is listed, alphabetized, and indexed in lexicographic resources, and it serves as the base reference for morphological analysis, language learning, and search tasks.

In Estonian linguistics, the diktionaarimuoto depends on the part of speech. For nouns, it is usually the nominative singular form. For verbs, the dictionary form is the infinitive, typically ending in -ma. For adjectives, the base form—the simple, positive form used in dictionaries—is treated as the lemma. Some pronouns, numerals, and other word classes have their own standard dictionary forms.

The concept is central to lemmatization and natural language processing: inflected variants are reduced to their dictionary forms to improve search, concordance, and cross-sentence comparisons. However, words with multiple distinct senses may have several lemmas, one per sense or one per major meaning. Context determines which dictionary form corresponds to a given usage. The notion of a dictionary form also explains why dictionaries group inflected forms under a single headword and why alphabetical ordering is based on that form.

See also: Lemma, Lemmatization, Lemmatization in Estonian.