lemma (linguistics)

The word lemma has a different meaning in logic and in mathematics. In linguistics a lemma is the canonical form of a lexeme.Specifically, in lexicography, "lemma" is a synonym for headword, q.v.In morphology, a lemma is the canonical form of a lexeme. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the forms that have the same meaning, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Czech. In this sense, a lemma can also be called a citation form. The process of determining the lemma for a given word is called lemmatisation.
See more at Wikipedia.org...