wordForm

A wordform is any distinct surface form of a word as it appears in spoken or written language. It represents the specific realization that results from applying inflectional or derivational morphology to a lemma, the dictionary or base form. The wordform is the visible form in a particular context, while the lemma is the canonical form used for reference.

Examples illustrate the distinction. The verb talk has wordforms such as talk, talks, talked, and talking. The noun cat has wordforms cat and cats. The adjective good can yield forms like good, better, and best in languages that mark comparison. In languages with rich morphology, wordforms may encode grammatical information such as tense, number, person, case, mood, aspect, gender, and voice.

Wordforms play a central role in lexicography, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing. In NLP, text is typically analyzed as a sequence of wordforms (tokens). Downstream tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and information retrieval often use or require knowledge of the underlying lemma or stem to group related forms together. Morphological analyzers and lexicons may list all common wordforms for a lemma or generate possible forms through rules.

Wordforms also arise in derivational morphology, where new forms extend beyond simple inflection, such as run becoming runner or running. Understanding wordforms supports linguistic analysis, language teaching, and the development of language technologies that handle pluralization, conjugation, agreement, and other morphological phenomena.