headwords

A headword is the form of a word that serves as the entry point in a dictionary, glossary, or other lexical resource. It is usually the canonical, base, or lemma form from which inflected or derived forms are organized and shown as variants under the same entry. In many languages, the headword is the form used to cite the word in cross-references and search indexes.

In lexicography, the headword anchors the entry’s essential information: pronunciation or phonetic transcription, part of speech, definitions and senses, usage notes, etymology, and often a brief example. The headword can be a single word or a fixed multiword expression, such as "kid gloves" or "high school," depending on the language and the dictionary's scope.

Headwords are selected to represent a standard or base form. They may ignore inflectional endings, but may include capitalization and diacritics as appropriate. In dictionaries, inflected forms are shown as variants beneath the headword, together with cross-references to related words.

In linguistics and natural language processing, the headword is closely related to the lemma. The lemma is the abstract dictionary form used for lemmatization, while a headword serves as the user-facing key for indexing and retrieval in lexicographic resources.

The term headword comes from the sense of the "head" or main entry of a list. It is sometimes used interchangeably with lemma, though some contexts distinguish the two terms based on scope and function.