Stemming

A function of some search engines and directories which allows results to be returned from some or all keywords based on the same stem as the keyword entered as a search term. For example, when stemming is switched on, a search for the word dance will return matches for any word whose stem is danc-, matching the keywords dance, dancer and dancing.

Using the stem of a word to help satisfy search relevancy requirements. EX: searching for swimming can return results which contain swim. This usually enhances the quality of search results due to the extreme diversity of word used in, and their application in the English language.

Search engines such as Google use a process called stemming to deliver results based on a word's root spelling. An example would be similar search results returned for clothes as for the word clothing.

The ability for a search to include the "stem" of words. For example, stemming allows a user to enter "swimming" and get back results also for the stem word "swim."

Crushed stone, soil, sand, or drill cuttings used to plug the unloaded portion of a drill hole.

A method of mapping a linguistic stem to all matching words. For example, in English, the stem "buy" matches "bought," "buying," and "buys."

Stemming is using linguistic analysis to reduce a word to its root form (stam), and then matching all forms of a word in a search query to all forms of the same word in documents. Stemming, in contrast to lemmatization, is normally only based on removing trailing parts of a word, leaving the stam. Lemmatization is normally based on dictionary lookup.

See word stemming.