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What is "headword"

Crossword clues for headword

headword
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
headword
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A typical problem might be to answer the question: How many headwords belong to more than one part of speech?
▪ Collocations are similar to dictionary definitions in as much as they can be expressed as a headword followed by a list of semantically related words.
▪ For example under the headword child is the information that the plural is children rather than childs.
▪ For example, the editor will need to check lists of headwords which begin with lower-case letters.
▪ The format is also comparable, i.e. a headword followed by a list of related words in parentheses.
▪ The irregular inflection will be presented as a headword with a reference to the appropriate root form.
▪ The lemmatised form is simply a convenient representation of the headword lemma.
▪ To reduce overheads when making security copies only headword lemmas are placed in this table.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
headword

headword \headword\ n.

  1. a word that is qualified by a modifier.

  2. a word placed at the beginning of a line, paragraph, or short article (as in a dictionary or encyclopedia entry); the word which forms the title of an entry in a dictionary.

headword

main entry word \main entry word\ n. The form of a word that heads a lexical entry and is alphabetized in a dictionary; also called entry word, headword, and lemma.

Syn: citation form, entry word, headword, lemma.

Note: In different languages, different wordforms, such as cases for verbs, may be taken as the main entry word. In English dictionaries, it is the infinitive form, but in latin dictionaries it is usually the first person singular present.

Wiktionary
headword

n. 1 a word used as the title of a section, particularly in a dictionary, encyclopedia, or thesaurus 2 (context grammar English) any word which may be modified by an adjunct

WordNet
headword

  1. n. a word that is qualified by a modifier [syn: head word]

  2. a word placed at the beginning of a line or paragraph (as in a dictionary entry)

Wikipedia
Headword

A headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appear. The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position. Depending on the size and nature of the dictionary or encyclopedia, the entry may include alternative meanings of the word, its etymology and pronunciation, compound words or phrases that contain the headword, and encyclopedic information about the concepts represented by the word.

For example, the headword bread may contain the following (simplified) definitions:

Bread (noun)
  • A common food made from the combination of flour, water and yeast
  • Money (slang)
(verb)
  • To coat in breadcrumbs
— to know which side your bread is buttered to know how to act in your own best interests.

The Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian contains around 500,000 headwords. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has around 273,000 headwords, while Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary has about 470,000. The Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB), the largest lexicon of the German language, has around 330,000 headwords. These values are cited by the dictionary makers, and may not use exactly the same definition of a headword. In addition, headwords may not accurately reflect a dictionary's size. The OED and the DWB, for instance, include exhaustive historical reviews and exact citations from source documents not usually found in standard dictionaries.

The term 'lemma' comes from the practice in Greco-Roman antiquity of using the word to refer to the headwords of marginal glosses in scholia; for this reason, the Ancient Greek plural form is sometimes used, namely lemmata (Greek λῆμμα, pl. λήμματα).