Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The fundamental unit of the lexicon of a language. Find, finds, found, and finding are forms of the English lexeme find.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun linguistics 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).
  • noun computing an individual instance of a continuous character sequence without spaces, used in lexical analysis (see token)

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun 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

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[lex(icon) + –eme.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin lexis, from Ancient Greek λέξις (léxis, "word") + -eme a suffix indicating a fundamental unit in some aspect of linguistic structure. Extracted from phoneme, from Ancient Greek φώνημα (phōnēma, "sound"), from φωνέω (phōneō, "to sound"), from φωνή (phōnē, "sound").

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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.

    Archive 2010-01-01 DC 2010

  • 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.

    On the 800-word myth DC 2010

  • 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 2009

  • 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 2009

  • However, I've not yet found another lexeme with this same u ~ au alternation.

    A new value for Minoan 'd' 2009

  • 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.

    Rambles at starchamber.com » Blog Archive » Color My World 2008

  • 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?

    On being linguistically defeated DC 2008

  • 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.

    Still on the hunt for Semitic-PIE connections 2008

  • 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).

    Understanding Openness glyn moody 2008

  • 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.

    The Truth Will Out. Fathorse 2008

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