Lemmatic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Relating to the lemma, the base dictionary form of a word, or to the process of reducing words to that form
2. Describing the reduction of inflected words to their root form, as used in linguistics and text processing
3. Of or concerning the lemma, the canonical headword that represents all the inflected variants of a word

Etymology: "Lemmatic" is formed from "lemma" plus the suffix "-tic," which forms adjectives meaning "relating to" or "having the nature of." A lemma, in the sense relevant here, is the base or dictionary form of a word, the headword under which all its inflected forms are gathered, so "lemmatic" describes things connected with that process, such as lemmatic analysis or lemmatic searching in computational linguistics and text processing. The suffix "-tic" reached English through Latin "-ticus" from Greek "-tikos," where it was used to turn nouns and verbs into adjectives, as in "poetic" or "systematic." Its attachment to "lemma" is a modern formation, so the word belongs to the vocabulary of linguists and computer scientists rather than to older English.