The term 'lemma' comes from the practice in Greco-Roman antiquity of using the word to refer to the headwords of marginal glosses in scholia; for this reason the Ancient Greek plural form is sometimes used namely lemmata (Greek pl. ). References http://www.oed.com/about/facts.html http://www.merriam-webster.com/premium/mwunabridged/ This language-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.v d e v d eLexicography Types of reference works Dictionary  Glossary  Lexicon  Thesaurus Types of dictionaries Bilingual  Biographical  Conceptual  Defining  Electronic  Encyclopedic  Language for specific purposes dictionary  Machine-readable  Maximizing  Medical  Minimizing  Monolingual learner's  Multi-field  Phonetic  Picture  Reverse  Rhyming  Rime  Single-field  Specialized  Sub-field  Visual Lexicographic projects Lexigraf  WordNet Other List of lexicographers  List of online dictionaries v d eLexicology Major terms Lexicon  Idiolect  Word  Lexis  Lexical unit Elements Morpheme  Grapheme  Glyphs  Phoneme  Sememe  Seme  Lexeme  Lemma  Meronymy  Chereme Semantic relations Holonymy  Hyponymy  Troponymy  Idiom  Synonym  Antonymy  Lexical semantics  Semantic net Fonctions Function word  Headword Fields Morphology  Controlled vocabulary  English lexicology and lexicography  Lexicographic error  Lexicographic information cost  Linguistic prescription  Specialised lexicography  International scientific vocabulary