In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of words (headword). In English, for example, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, with run as the lemma. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the forms that have the same meaning, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme.
In lexicography, this unit is usually also the citation form or headword by which it is indexed. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Russian.
The process of determining the lemma for a given word is called lemmatisation.
The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary.
So, in short … A lemma is the dictionary term for the word you’re looking up. If you were to look up the word “jumping” in an English dictionary, you wouldn’t find it as a headword. What you would find is “jump,” the word that represents “jump,” “jumping,” “jumped,” and “jumps.” In this case “jump” is the lemma.
Editor Note: “The More You Know…” >> Took a linguistics class in college, and decided to share the craziness running around my head tonight. Enjoy! PS: Sorry this isn’t Word Wednesday… SURPRISE.. it’s WORD THURSDAY?
I’m going to be traveling this week, so the usual Monday Musings and Word Wednesday posts may be delayed. (I know for a fact the Monday Musings posts will be). Maybe you will get Tuesday Travel instead!
As a history major in undergrad, and a book lover for more years than I care to count, finding the notice on Chained Libraries on Atlas Obscura tickled my fancy. I’ve officially added a ton of places to go visit on my bucket list now –Sorry, Hubby! The below information comes directly from the Hereford Cathedral website, as who better to describe what is there than the curators of the Library themselves? If, one day I actually get to see this in person, I’ll be sure to re-blog and tell you my own personal thoughts. Until then… Happy exploring.
TheChained Library at Hereford Cathedral is a unique and fascinating treasure in Britain’s rich heritage of library history.
There were books at Hereford Cathedral long before there was a ‘library’ in the modern sense.
The cathedral’s earliest and most important book is the eighth-century Hereford Gospels; it is one of 229 medieval manuscripts which now occupy two bays of the Chained Library.
This is the oldest complete book in Hereford Cathedral Library. It dates from around the year 800 AD and may be the earliest surviving book made in Wales. It contains the first four books of the New Testament: the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These narratives of the life, death and resurrection of Christ are regarded by Christians as their most precious and sacred writings.
Chaining books was the most widespread and effective security system in European libraries from the middle ages to the eighteenth century, and Hereford Cathedral’s seventeenth-century Chained Library is the largest to survive with all its chains, rods and locks intact.
Hereford Gospels (detail) courtesy of Hereford Cathedral Library and Archives
A chain is attached at one end to the front cover of each book; the other end is slotted on to a rod running along the bottom of each shelf. The system allows a book to be taken from the shelf and read at the desk, but not to be removed from the bookcase.
The books are shelved with their foredges, rather than their spines, facing the reader (the wrong way round to us); this allows the book to be lifted down and opened without needing to be turned around – thus avoiding tangling the chain.
There is an interactive website you can take a 360-degree tour of the library.
Did You Know?
•There has been a working theological library at the cathedral since the twelfth century, and the whole library continues to serve the cathedral’s work and witness both as a research centre and as a tourist attraction.
•The Chained Library has about 1500 books which date from the late fifteenth- to the early nineteenth-centuries. Fifty-six of them are incunabula, i.e. books printed before 1500. They are chiefly concerned with theology, biblical studies, law and church history.
Have you been to Hereford Cathedral and seen the Chained Library in person? Tell me in the comments, or on my twitter page .
Stay tuned for more on unique and amazing libraries around the world!
In 1934, the word “Dord“appeared in the Second Edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary on page 771, between “dorcopsis” (“a genus of small kangaroos of Papau”) and “doré,” (“golden in color”).
It was defined as a noun meaning Density in Physics and Chemistry.
Before it came into the everyday lexicon, however, it was removed in the 1939 Edition. Why? It was found out to be a typist’s error, and not a real word, by an editor who noticed that it was missing its etymology (origin) and decided to follow up.
The following is an excerpt from The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (Herbert C. Morton, 1994):
The lack of an etymology for dord, meaning “density,” was noted by an editor on February 28, 1939, when he was perusing the dictionary. Startled by the omission, he went to the files to track down what had happened and what needed to be done. There, he found, first, a three-by-five white slip that had been sent to the company by a consultant in chemistry on July 31, 1931, bearing the notation “D or d, cont/ density.” It was intended to be the basis for entering an additional abbreviation at the letter D in the next edition. The notation “cont,” short for “continued,” was to alert the typist to the fact that there would be several such entries for abbreviations at D. A change in the organization of the dictionary possibly added to the confusion that followed. For the 1934 edition, all abbreviations were to be assembled in a separate “Abbreviations” section at the back of the book; in the previous edition words and abbreviations appeared together in a single alphabetical listing (which is how they again appeared in the Third Edition.) But after the original slip was typed for editorial handling, it was misdirected. Eventually, it came to be treated with the words rather than with the abbreviations.
The editorial stylist who received the first typed version should have marked “or” to be set in italics to indicate that the letters were abbreviations (D or d). But instead, she drew a continuous wavy line underneath to signify that “D or d” should be set in boldface in the manner of an entry word, and a label was added, “Physics & Chem.” Since entry words were to be typed with a space between letters, the editorial stylist may have inferred that the typist had intended to write d o r d; the mysterious “cont” was ignored. These errors should have been caught when the word was retyped on a different color slip for the printer, but they were not. The stylist who received this version crossed out the “cont” and added the part-of-speech label n for noun.
“As soon as someone else entered the pronunciation,” Gove wrote, “dord was given the slap on the back that sent breath into its being. Whether the etymologist ever got a chance to stifle it, there is no evidence. It simply has no etymology. Thereafter, only a proofreader had final opportunity at the word, but as the proof passed under his scrutiny he was at the moment not so alert and suspicious as usual.”
The last slip in the file – added in 1939 – was marked “plate change imperative/urgent.” The entry was deleted, and the space was closed up by lengthening the entry that followed. In 1940 bound books began appearing without the ghost word but with a new abbreviation. In the list of meanings for the abbreviation “Dord” appeared the phrase “density,Physics.” Probably too bad, Gove added, “for why shouldn’t dord mean density?”
The first person one meets (either leaving or entering their house) after the start of the New Year.
Etymology
Qualtagh is from a form of Gaelic known as Manx. It is spoken on the Isle of Man, a Literally the word qualtagh means “first foot”, as in the first person to set foot in the house on New Year’s Day, or the first person one met when they set foot outside on New Year’s Day.
In order to be the “first foot”, one cannot have been present in the house at the stroke of midnight. So being there and then going outside and coming back in does not make one the Qualtagh of the place.
It may also be used to refer to the first person a woman encounters after being confined to her house following the birth of a child.
Did You Know?
The new year’s qualtagh, for luck, is supposed to be a dark-haired man. A red-headed or female qualtagh is unlucky. Other things to bring luck to the house on New Year’s Day include serving black-eyed peas, having the qualtagh bring shortbread and whiskey (sounds fine for any day of the year), and sweeping all the garbage in the house out through the front door before midnight on New Year’s Eve (so that any of the misfortune of the past year is gone, not to return).
In Greece, the “first foot” is referred to as the Pothariko (pothari-KO). Their right foot needs to be the first one to cross the threshold, and they bring pomegranates to throw on the floor for good luck.
given to, or characterized by the use of long words
Etymology
mid 17th century: from Latin.
Horace, the Roman poet known for his satire, was merely being gently ironic when he cautioned young poets against using “sesquipedalia verba”-“words a foot and a half long”-in his book Ars poetica, a collection of maxims about writing. But in the 17th century, English literary critics decided the word sesquipedalian could be very useful for lambasting writers using unnecessarily long words.
Your Latin Lesson:
Latin sesquipedalis, literally, a foot and a half long
from sesqui- “half as much again” + ped-, pes “foot”
Did You Know?
Words that Rhyme with Sesquipedalian: Episcopalian, tatterdemalion, Australian, bacchanalian.
A sesquiquadrate is an 135-degree angle.
A sesquicentennial is a period of 150 years.
A sesquinona in music, is an interval having the ratio or 9:10—that is, a lesser major second.
A lung disease caused by inhaling fine particles of silica.
Etymology
New York Herald Tribune Masthead
The story goes that this word was invented in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers’ League, at its annual meeting. The word figured in the headline for an article published by the New York Herald Tribune on February 23, 1935, titled “Puzzlers Open 103d Session Here by Recognizing 45-Letter Word”:
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis succeeded electrophotomicrographically as the longest word in the English language recognized by the National Puzzlers’ League at the opening session of the organization’s 103rd semi-annual meeting held yesterday at the Hotel New Yorker. The puzzlers explained that the forty-five-letter word is the name of a special form of silicosis caused by ultra-microscopic particles of silica volcanic dust…
Your Latin Lesson: From New Latin, from Greek
pneumono- (lung) +
Latin ultra- (beyond, extremely) +
Greek micro- (small) +
-scopic (looking) +
Latin silico (like sand) +
volcano +
Greek konis (dust) +
-osis (condition)
Did You Know?
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis has 45-letters.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, made famous by Mary Poppins, has 34-letters.
For a shortened version, pneumoconiosis means the same thing, or you can call it silicosis, or black lung.
Image of the New York Herald Tribune courtesy of Andrew Cusack
Mid 18th century: from Latinflocci, nauci, nihili, pili (words meaning ‘at little value’) + -fication. The Latin elements were listed in a well-known rule of the Latin Grammar used at Eton College, an English public school.
Your Latin Lesson: flocci, from floccus (tuft of wool) + nauci, from naucum (a trifling thing) + nihili, from Latin nihil (nothing) + pili, from pilus (a hair, trifle) +
–fication (making).
Did You Know?
It was the longest word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, but pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis beat it out in the second edition.
Receive
Recommend
Relevant
Religious
Restaurant
Ridiculous
Rhythm
Schedule
Scissors
Seize
Separate
Sergeant
Supercede
Their/ There/ They’re
Twelfth
Vacuum
Vicious
Villain
Weather
Weird
Whether
*Notes*
Foreign: Like ‘believe’ and ‘weird’, one of several words that violate the i-before-e rule.
Its / It’s: The apostrophe marks a contraction of “it is.”
Lightning: not to be confused with Lightening
Mispell Misspell: What is more embarrassing than to misspell the name of the problem? Just remember that it is mis + spell and that will spell you the worry about spelling “misspell.”
Playwright: Remember that a play writer in Old English was called a “play worker” and “wright” is from an old form of “work” (wrought iron, etc.)
Principal / Principle: The spelling principle to remember here is that the school principal is a prince and a pal (despite appearances)–and the same applies to anything of foremost importance, such as a principal principle. A “principle” is a rule.
Queue: Means to be in line, so just remember there are 2 -ue’s in line behind q.
