What is lexicon

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Usage explanations of natural written and spoken English. Grammar Thesaurus. Word Lists. Choose your language. My word lists. Tell us about this example sentence:. The word in the example sentence does not match the entry word. A lexeme is the basic unit of meaning in the lexicon, or vocabulary of a specific language or culture. When appearing alone, it conveys a single meaning.

A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge such as nautical or medical. Lexemes are the headwords in dictionaries. A lexicon consists of lexemes.

Lexemes also play an important part in computer programming languages. Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms In linguistics, a lexeme is the fundamental unit of the lexicon or word stock of a language.

Also known as a lexical unit, lexical item, or lexical word. Lexicology is the part of linguistics that studies words. An allied science to lexicology is lexicography, which also studies words, but primarily in relation with dictionaries — it is concerned with the inclusion of words in dictionaries and from that perspective with the whole lexicon. In linguistics the term is lexeme represents the basic or dictionary form of the word. Lexemes are abstract representations, which presumably are listed in the brain in a component called the lexicon.

Each inflected form of a lexeme is called a word-form. The set of word-forms of a given lexeme is called a paradigm. The lexical analyzer generated automatically by a tool like lex, or hand-crafted reads in a stream of characters, identifies the lexemes in the stream, and categorizes them into tokens.

This is termed tokenizing. If the lexer finds an invalid token, it will report an error. A lexeme is a theoretical construct that stands for the unitary meaning and shared syntactic properties of a group of word forms. A lexeme is stripped of any inflectional endings.

Thus play, plays, played, and playing are all inflected forms of the lexeme play. In linguistics and lexicography, lemma is the form of a word under which it is registered in a dictionary. A lemma is, so to speak, the keyword in the respective reference work.

Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks.