Headword
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appears. 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)
- (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 has around 300,000 headwords [1], while Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary has about 470,000 [2]. Both of these values are as claimed by the dictionary makers, and may not be using exactly the same definition of a headword. Also, the Oxford English Dictionary covers each word much more exhaustively than the Third New International.
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).
