From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishheadwordhead‧word /ˈhedwɜːd $ -wɜːrd/ noun [countable] technical TCNone of the words whose meaning is explained in a dictionary
Examples from the Corpus
headword• Collocations are similar to dictionary definitions in as much as they can be expressed as a headword followed by a list of semantically related words.• The irregular inflection will be presented as a headword with a reference to the appropriate root form.• The format is also comparable, i.e. a headword followed by a list of related words in parentheses.• A typical problem might be to answer the question: How many headwords belong to more than one part of speech?• For example, the editor will need to check lists of headwords which begin with lower-case letters.• To reduce overheads when making security copies only headword lemmas are placed in this table.• The lemmatised form is simply a convenient representation of the headword lemma.• For example under the headword child is the information that the plural is children rather than childs. 