lexeme

Noun

lexeme (plural lexemes)

1. (strictly) 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...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...2014 September 25, Rochelle Lieber, Pavol Stekauer, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, page 347

   Synonyms:

   lexical item, semanteme

2. (broadly, metonymically) The set itself; a lexemic family.
3. (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...2024, Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Truth About English Grammar, Polity Press, →ISBN, page 17

   Synonyms:

   base form, basic form, canonical form, citation form, dictionary form, headword, lemma

4. An individual instance of a continuous character sequence without spaces, used in lexical analysis.
   • Near-synonym: token

   Synonyms:

   token