meginorð

Meginorð is a linguistic term used in Icelandic lexicography and linguistics to denote the canonical form of a word that is chosen as the entry form in dictionaries and linguistic descriptions. The term combines megin, meaning main or primary, with orð, meaning word.

Because languages inflect, many surface forms of a word are derived from a single meginorð. The meginorð is the form under which the word's meaning and grammatical information are documented, and from which inflected variants are produced or listed as alternatives. In lexicographic practice, it is often called the lemma or headword. The specific form chosen as the meginorð varies by language: for verbs, it is typically the dictionary citation form (the infinitive in many languages); for nouns, the singular nominative; for adjectives, a base or citation form. However, there can be exceptions when historical or frequency considerations lead lexicographers to select a different lemma.

In computational linguistics and natural language processing, lemmatization is the process of reducing inflected forms to their meginorð; a meginorð lexicon supports morphological analysis, concordance generation, and search indexing.

The concept of a meginorð provides a stable reference point for organizing linguistic data, aiding both human readers and software in linking related forms to a single underlying form.