woordstam

Woordstam, also written as stam in Dutch linguistics, is the part of a word that remains when inflectional endings are removed. It is the base form to which inflectional or derivational affixes attach to create different word forms. In Dutch, the woordstam is the form used to build the various conjugations and derived words of a lexeme.

A key distinction is between woordstam and lemma. The lemma is the canonical dictionary form of a word (for verbs, typically the infinitive; for nouns, the singular). The woordstam is the underlying stem that combines with affixes to produce inflected forms. In regular words, the woordstam often corresponds to the lemma, but irregular forms may alter the stem, so the stam and the lemma can diverge.

Examples help illustrate the idea. For a regular verb like maken (to make), the infinitive zijn is maken; the stem is maak-, which combines with endings to form ik maak, jij maakt, wij maken, etc. For a noun such as tafel (table), the stem can be treated as tafel-, which participates in plural formation (tafels) and in compounds (tafelblad, tafelkleed), with the base tafel serving as the common element.

In practice, woordstam is central in language analysis, language teaching, dictionary compilation, and natural language processing. Stemming and lemmatization aim to reduce words to a common stem or lemma to improve search, indexing, and linguistic analysis, though care must be taken to avoid conflating distinct meanings that share a stem.