rotsordet

Rotsordet, or the root word, is a linguistic concept that refers to the base form or root morpheme of a word from which other inflected or derived forms are built. In many languages, including Swedish, the rotsordet carries the core lexical meaning and serves as the anchor for morphological analysis. The term is commonly discussed alongside lemmas and stems in lexicography and language teaching.

The rotsordet is typically the form without inflectional endings, but it is not always identical to the exact written form used in everyday speech. In some cases the infinitive or citation form differs from the underlying stem, especially with irregular verbs or suppletion. Different linguistic traditions may treat rotsordet, stem, and lemma with slightly different definitions, but all focus on identifying the core unit from which word variants are generated.

Examples help illustrate the idea. For the Swedish verb “springa,” the rotsordet can be viewed as the stem “spring-,” from which forms like “springer,” “sprang,” and “sprungit” are derived. For a noun such as “bil” (car), the rotsordet is the root “bil-,” with plural “bilar” and definite form “bilen” produced by attaching standard suffixes to that core.

In practice, rotsordet is used in language teaching, dictionaries, and linguistic analysis to explain how words are formed, how related words are grouped into families, and how productive patterns apply across a vocabulary.