nounname

Nounname is a term used in linguistics and computational lexicography to denote the canonical label assigned to a noun within a lexical database, dictionary entry, or natural language processing system. It provides a stable reference form intended for indexing, search, and cross-lingual alignment.

Origin and usage: The term is not universally standardized and appears mainly in discussions about representing nouns in multilingual resources and NLP tools. In many frameworks nounname is treated as synonymous with the lemma or headword—the dictionary form used to ground inflectional paradigms.

Definition and scope: A nounname typically corresponds to the base or lemma form of a noun, the form preferred for sorting and canonical representation. It remains constant across inflected variants, and is distinct from proper nouns, which may have separate nounname representations in some datasets.

Examples: English examples include nounname 'dog' for the plural 'dogs' and nounname 'child' for 'children'. In French, 'cheval' is the nounname for 'chevaux', and in many databases the diacritic word 'café' is stored as nounname 'café'.

Status and critique: Because nounname is not a universally adopted standard, its use varies across resources. Some researchers worry it can cause ambiguity with lemmas, while others see it as a way to improve cross-resource consistency when clearly defined in a dataset.

See also: lemma; headword; canonical form; stem; lexical entry.