lexeme
noun/ˈlɛkˌsiːm/
Etymology From Latin lexis, from Ancient Greek λέξις (léxis, “word”) + -eme, a suffix indicating a fundamental unit in some aspect of linguistic structure, on the model of phoneme.
› A lexical item corresponding to the set of…
1
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences The abstract minimum unit of language or meaning that underlies such a set.
- A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning, which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain. Thus, fibrillate, rain cats and dogs, and come in are all lexemes, as are elephant, jog, cholesterol, happiness, put up with, face the music, and hundreds of thousands of other meaningful items in English.2003, David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, page 118:
- In a typical lexicalist approach (e.g. Koontz-Garboden 2006), the unmarked lexeme is taken as lexically listed, even if its meaning (as it often does) includes templatic entailments, and the derivational morphology is taken to operate on the underived form to yield the derived form. This is the case not only morphologically, but also semantically.2014 September 25, Rochelle Lieber, Pavol Stekauer, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, page 347:
2
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences Broadly, Metonymically The set itself; a lexemic family.
3
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences Broadly, Metonymically The wordform chosen to represent such a set or family.
- For the second sense, where “word” means “item that should have its own dictionary entry,” lexicographers sometimes use the term “lemma,” but that has other meanings too, so among linguists the term lexeme is now standard, and I’ll use it. For the different forms or shapes that belong to a lexeme we can use the term word-form. ¶ And as a typographical convention, from now on I’ll always put lexeme names in bold italics with a capital letter. So I’ll say there is a lexeme called Pamper [emphasis in original]. It’s the name of a small collection of word-forms with particular spellings – four of them: pamper, pampered, pampering, and pampers. I will always put word-forms (and all the phrases and clauses I mention as examples) in italics.2024, Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Truth About English Grammar, Polity Press, →ISBN, page 17:
4
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences An individual instance of a continuous character sequence without spaces, used in lexical analysis.
- Near-synonym: token
- Derived terms
- interlexeme, lexemehood, lexemic