1. (linguistics) the form of a word after all affixes are removed; - Example: "thematic vowels are part of the stem" [syn: root, root word, base, stem, theme, radical]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
root word
n 1: (linguistics) the form of a word after all affixes are
removed; "thematic vowels are part of the stem" [syn:
root, root word, base, stem, theme, radical]