Editing Word stem (section)

== Citation forms and bound morphemes ==
{{main|Lemma (morphology)}}

In languages with very little inflection, such as [[English language|English]] and [[Chinese language|Chinese]], the stem is usually not distinct from the "normal" form of the word (the lemma, citation, or dictionary form). However, in other languages, word stems may rarely or never occur on their own. For example, the English verb stem ''run'' is indistinguishable from its present tense form (except in the third person singular). However, the equivalent [[Spanish language|Spanish]] verb stem ''corr-'' never appears as such because it is cited with the infinitive inflection (''correr'') and always appears in actual speech as a non-finite (infinitive or participle) or conjugated form. Such morphemes that cannot occur on their own in this way are usually referred to as ''bound morphemes''.

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.{{citation needed|date=May 2018}} For example, given the word "produced", its lemma (linguistics) is "produce", but the stem is "produc-" because of the inflected form "producing".