lexème

A lexeme is the abstract unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of morphologically related forms. In linguistic analysis, a lexeme represents the conceptual item rather than any particular inflected form. In dictionaries, the lexeme is typically the entry headword or lemma.

The term contrasts with a word form, which is a specific realization in a given context (for example, "go", "goes", "going", "went", "gone" are forms of the same lexeme). The collection of all inflected forms constitutes the lexeme's paradigm. The term lemma often denotes a representative form of a lexeme used as the dictionary headword, usually the citation form.

Lexemes can correspond to content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) as well as function words in some analyses. The lexeme concept helps separate meaning from morphophonological variation, enabling cross-language comparison of word families.

Origin: The term lexeme comes from the Greek lexis "speech, word" with the suffixed -eme; it was adopted into linguistics in the 19th and 20th centuries to discuss lexical items independent of their inflectional forms.

In practical linguistics and lexicography, describing a language's lexicon involves listing its lexemes and their paradigms, providing lemmas in dictionaries and storing morphological rules that generate the corresponding word forms.