Words & WritingGreek → English
Lexeme
/ˈlɛksiːm/noun
The abstract word behind all its inflected forms, the thing a dictionary gives one entry to.
The Greek roots
λέξις
léxis
word, speech, diction
-ημα
-ēma
result of the action
Literally: “word unit”
The story of the word
Run, runs, ran and running are four shapes of one lexeme, which is why they share a dictionary entry and why a spellchecker has to know they belong together. λέξις meant speech and diction, the way a thing is put into words, and Aristotle uses it in the Poetics for a play's verbal style. The suffix came over from φώνημα, and the same λέξις gives lexicon, from λεξικὸν βιβλίον, a word-book, along with dyslexia.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
lexicondyslexialexicalphoneme
In a sentence
The corpus holds nine million words but only about forty thousand lexemes.
Ask how many words a language has and you are really asking about lexemes.