noun ·Moderate ·College level
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"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."
"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."
"Near-synonym: token"
"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."
A lexical item corresponding to the set of all words (or of all multi-word expressions) that are semantically related through inflection of a particular shared basic form.; The abstract minimum unit of language or meaning that underlies such a set.
Common synonyms include: academic term, antonym, articulation, base form, casino, dutch woord.
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.
Pronounced /ˈlɛkˌsiːm/.
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.