In linguistics, a word stem is a word part responsible for a word's lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question.

Learning about the building blocks of words can help you make sense of unfamiliar words.

Jul 10, 2020 · Stems in English are the base forms of words before adding inflections like prefixes or suffixes. Stems can be single roots, compound roots, or roots with affixes, forming new words in …

What is the difference between a word's root and a word's stem? Wikipedia: "For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called …

Definition: Affixes added to the beginning (prefixes) or end (suffixes) of a word to modify its meaning. Examples: 'Un-' is a prefix meaning 'not', '-able' is a suffix meaning 'capable of'.

The stem is not necessarily the word used in speech, but the base of the word that carries the meaning. However, knowing the stem is useful in forming related words.

a word consists of a stem and an inflectional ending, and the stem in turn consists of a root and zero or more derivational suffixes and stem formatives.

Apr 30, 2025 · The stem is the basic form of a word without any added prefixes, suffixes, or inflections. It’s the starting point, the "root" from which related words are built.

In computational linguistics, the term "stem" is used for the part of the word that never changes, even morphologically, when inflected, and a lemma is the base form of the word.

Feb 10, 2016 · So the word stem can be used in two different ways: It can be used to refer to what is left over after prefixes or suffixes are taken away from a word, and it can be used to refer to a word to …