formái

Formái is a Hungarian term that translates to 'forms' in English. In linguistics, formái refers to the different surface forms a word may take as it combines with grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, person, mood, voice, or definiteness. The set of all such forms constitutes a word's paradigm or inflectional system.

In highly inflected languages, formái are often realized through affixation. The Hungarian language, for example, attaches suffixes to a stem to signal grammatical relations. Some forms are predictable from regular rules; others are irregular and require memorization. Formái may include inflected nouns (case and number forms), adjectives (comparative and superlative forms), and verbs (conjugated forms across person and tense).

In dictionaries and language technologies, formái are enumerated for a lemma to aid lookup, spell-checking, and natural language processing. Morphological analyzers generate the full set of surface forms automatically from a base form, so users can find a word even if a specific ending is used.

Related topics include morphology, inflection, paradigm, and Hungarian grammar.