---
title: "Lemma — what it means · NoaLingua"
description: "A lemma is the dictionary form of a word, not the inflected form you met. Why finding it is the hard part of looking anything up mid-sentence."
url: "https://noalingua.com/glossary/lemma/"
language: "en"
modified: "2026-08-17"
license: "CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---
Glossary

# Lemma — the NoaLingua glossary

A lemma is the dictionary form of a word — the entry you would look up, as opposed to the inflected form you actually encountered.

"Went", "goes" and "going" are three forms of the lemma "go". Dictionaries are organised by lemma, but real text almost never gives you one, which is why looking up an inflected word in a paper dictionary requires you to already know the answer.

Resolving a form back to its lemma is called lemmatisation, and it is harder than it looks in languages with rich morphology — a single Finnish noun can have well over a dozen case forms, and Spanish verb paradigms run to over a million recorded forms.

In NoaLingua Clicking an inflected form resolves the lemma first, then names the exact form you clicked — "3rd person singular present of faire" — and opens the conjugation table at that tense. This is also why a verb takes a moment longer to look up than a noun.

## Where this shows up in NoaLingua

- [The word card, and how it resolves a form](https://noalingua.com/features/word-lookup/)
- [Why French grammar data is verbs only](https://noalingua.com/languages/french/)

## Related terms

[Morphology Morphology is the study of how words change form to express grammatical meaning — tense, number, case, gender, person.](https://noalingua.com/glossary/morphology/)[IPA The International Phonetic Alphabet is a notation in which every symbol stands for exactly one sound, regardless of language or spelling.](https://noalingua.com/glossary/ipa/)

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