kryefjalë

Kryefjalë, literally “head word,” is a term in Albanian lexicography describing the lemma or canonical form of a lexical item. It is the form selected as the entry point in dictionaries and as the anchor for indexing and cross-references. The kryefjalë represents the form under which inflected or derived forms are organized and shown to users.

In practice, the selection of a kryefjalë depends on the part of speech. For nouns, the headword is generally the base form used in the dictionary entry (often the singular nominative). For verbs, the headword is typically the lemma or infinitive form, from which tense and mood variants are generated. For adjectives and other parts of speech, the base or positive form serves as the kryefjalë; related degrees or derived forms are listed as inflections. When dealing with multiword expressions, the headword may be the principal word of the expression, and the full phrase is treated as a single entry.

Kryefjalë is central to both traditional lexicography and modern computational linguistics. It underpins lemmatization, search indexing, and cross-referencing within dictionaries, corpora, and language technologies that process Albanian text.