Word of the Day: Lemma

 

1. A heading indicating the subject or argument of a literary composition, an annotation, or a dictionary entry. 2. ​​A subsidiary or intermediate theorem in an argument or proof.

"My tutor pointed out a mistake in the lemma on the proof I was working on." "Instead of looking up the verb conjugation in the dictionary, you want to look up the lemma." "The argument was broken into several lemmas that needed to be proved individually."

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Greek, late 16th century

The word "lemma" comes from the Greek "lēmma," which means "something assumed." This definition applies most aptly to the logic context, in which a lemma is a supporting proposition in a larger argument. Linguists adopted the term, and this usage is how lemma is currently getting the spotlight: in AI and natural language processing (NLP). In a dictionary, a lemma is the base word.