How to use lemma in a sentence

13 example sentences · noun

Lemma means a proposition proved or accepted for immediate use in the proof of some other proposition. Example: “Cat is a lemma, but cats is not.”

Examples of lemma by meaning

nounA proposition proved or accepted for immediate use in the proof of some other proposition.

"I remember my wife and I spending one entire afternoon just working on some tiny little lemmas involved in the proof."1988 August 30, Malcolm W. Browne, “Intellectual Duel: Brash Challenge, Swift Response”, in The New York Times, archived from the original...

nounThe canonical form of an inflected word; i.e., the form usually found as the headword in a dictionary, such as the...

Cat is a lemma, but cats is not.
For quotations using this term, see Citations:lemma.
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.2024, Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Truth About English Grammar, Polity Press, →ISBN, page 17

More sentences with lemma

To prove the five lemma, just use a diagram chase.From the entry diagram chase
To prove the five lemma, just use diagram chasing.From the entry diagram chasing
According to the Gauss lemma, the product of primitive polynomials is primitive.2000, Jun-ichi Igusa, An Introduction to the Theory of Local Zeta Functions, American Mathematical Society, page 1. From the entry primitive polynomial
There is a pumping lemma for CFLs similar to the one for regular sets.1997, Dexter Kozen, Automata and computability, page 148. From the entry pumping lemma
LEMMA 5.2 Let X be a Hausdorff space and A a subset of X.1975, Bert Mendelson, Introduction to Topology, 3rd edition, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., published 1990, →ISBN, →OCLC, §5.3, page…. From the entry accumulation point
String-language hierarchies are usually proven using formalism-specific pumping lemmata.2010, Marco Kuhlmann, Dependency Structures and Lexicalized Grammars: An Algebraic Approach, page 107. From the entry pumping lemma
If unknown, leave as non lemmata not found.2010, “cayorodriguez” (username), “Lemmatization module in NLTK” in nltk-dev, Usenet. From the entry non-lemma
If a and b are not relatively prime, then the conclusion of Euclid's lemma may fail to hold.2007, David M. Burton, The History of Mathematics, McGraw-Hill, page 179. From the entry Euclid's lemma
These glossaria are alphabetically arranged according to the Latin lemmata and include explicatory glosses in a vernacular language.2006, E. K. Brown, Anne Anderson, editors, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 20. From the entry glossarium

Meaning of lemma

noun A proposition proved or accepted for immediate use in the proof of some other proposition.
noun A proposition originally used for such a purpose, but having later acquired a greater, independent, importance; a fundamental (often pithy) and widely-used result.
noun The canonical form of an inflected word; i.e., the form usually found as the headword in a dictionary, such as the nominative singular of a noun, the bare infinitive of a verb, etc.

Full definition of lemma

Questions about lemma in a sentence

How do you use lemma in a sentence?: Lemma is used as a noun. For example: “Cat is a lemma, but cats is not.”
What is a short sentence with lemma?: “For quotations using this term, see Citations:lemma.”
What does lemma mean?: Lemma means a proposition proved or accepted for immediate use in the proof of some other proposition.

Adapted from Wiktionary: lemma (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this page: “How to use lemma in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/lemma. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.