Word of the Day: Lexeme

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines this word as a meaningful linguistic unit that is an item in the vocabulary of a language.

Wikipedia defines a lexeme as an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word.

Perhaps an example will illustrate this simple concept that when defined makes my head spin. A great example is the the word, be, which has the following lexemes – am, is, are, was, were, been and being. Be is called the lemma.

Interestingly enough, ten different lemmas account for approximately 25% of all the one billion words used in the Oxford English Corpus; that’s one out of four words. These ten words are included in Fry’s top twenty-five instant word list as well as included in the Dolch word list. These words are commonly referred to as sight words or high frequency words. As a result, all of these words are incorporated in the sight word game, Erudition.

The ten lemmas are as follows: the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have and I.

Sources:
http://www.askoxford.com
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://www.merriam-webster.com