Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The fundamental unit of the lexicon of a language. Find, finds, found, and finding are forms of the English lexeme find.
Wiktionary
- n. Roughly, the set of inflected forms taken by a single word, such as the lexeme RUN including as members "run" (lemma), "running" (inflected form), or "ran", and excluding "runner" (derived term).
WordNet 3.0
- n. a minimal unit (as a word or stem) in the lexicon of a language; `go' and `went' and `gone' and `going' are all members of the English lexeme `go'
Etymologies
- lex(icon) + -eme.
Examples
“I got hold of an electronic copy of the paper and counted the number of different words it contained grouping inflectional variations, such as walk/walks/walking/walked, as a single item, or lexeme, as linguists call it.”
“However, I've not yet found another lexeme with this same u ~ au alternation.”
“No one questions that the lexeme Nihon consistently means "Japan", not "of Japan" in itself, however and this is how we see it translated in all dictionaries.”
Contradictions with authors' accounts of Etruscan word Rasna
“The f in this lexeme is merely lenition of p neighbouring tautosyllabic u, particularly when the next syllable contains a front vowel.”
Disproving a particular translation of TLE 193 once and for all
“We start with the adjective lexeme OPEN, which is a pure stative; The window is open doesn't require that it was ever closed (it might have been built that way), and The restaurant is open doesn't require that it was ever closed (it could be one of those restaurants that are always open).”
“The way She enunciated it brought Her fulgurant teeth to rest on Her lower lip as the upper lip rose slightly in the f; and then, for the u, Her lips parted as if for a kiss, and they stretched back into smiling as the lexeme culminated so regally in king.”
“Speaking of red, linguists have determined that if any world language has only one a lexeme for a color besides black and white, it is always red.”
“The cases all described are interesting, but now I must ask some questions about a child I new when I was four, who was fluent in 4 languages Is "Quadlingual" a standardised lexeme?”
“A simple glottal stop (not a huge step up from no sound at all) being loaned as a creaky voiced velar stop (a very complex consonant) sounds like, to put it lightly, the kind of a correspondence I'd like to see more than one lexeme pair supporting.”
“Even if it does negate the lexeme, "A -" still means "without," and "without" still refers to the state of being of the person being explained.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘lexeme’.
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Word Words
This used to be my nym list, but there are so many words about words, I think it's time to expand and open.
acronym, antonym, aptronym, autoantonym, autonym, bacronym, capitonym, contranym, contronym, eponym, exonym, heteronym and 120 more...
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Lyngwistix
semantic, semiotic, linguistic, etc.
lexeme, sonorant, prosody, monophthong, portmanteau, dithyramb, inflection, deixis, mondegreen, screed, persiflage, polysemy and 27 more...
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These words are about words.
words on words. yyep.
codex, folio, lexicon, tome, word stock, wordbook, wordlist, palaver, word index, argot, parlance, doublespeak and 68 more...

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