Talk:Headword

Number of Words in English

The article "Number of Words in English" contains a value of 500,000 for the total number of headwords in the OED. These two should be reconciled.

Wikipedia has about 3 million headwords. Could wikipedia provide them as a download somewhere? http://www.crossword-compiler.com/wordlists.html#add offers the wikipedia headword list. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.177.205.91 (talk) 16:35, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Article unclear

I find this article unclear. "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: "

According to the above definition, the headword is a pointer to an article, which is called entry. But in the sentence "[..] the headword bread may contain the following (simplified) definitions" 'headword' is used as a synonym of the 'entry' (or complete article).

Personally, I would prefer 'headword' for the pointer (a word or word group) and 'lemma' for the complete article. 'Entry' sounds to pointer-like to my ears.Yospangsada (talk) 19:48, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Merge?

I don't see why this article shouldn't be merged with Lemma (linguistics). FilipeS (talk) 17:36, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Seconded A.j.roberts (talk) 14:01, 5 April 2022 (UTC)