citation form

American  

noun

Linguistics.

1. the spoken form a word has when produced in isolation, such as when cited for purposes of illustration, as distinguished from the form it would have when produced in the normal stream of speech.

2. the form of a lexical set that represents its entire inflectional paradigm in linguistic discussions and dictionary entries.

   “Be” is the citation form for “be,” “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” “been.”

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