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Encyclopedic overview
In linguistics, a word stem is a word part responsible for a word's lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. For instance, in Athabaskan linguistics, a verb stem is a root that cannot appear on its own and that carries the tone of the word.
Typically, a stem remains unmodified during inflection with few exceptions due to apophony (for example in Polish, miast-o ("city") and w mieści-e ("in the city"); in English, sing, sang, and sung, where it can be modified according to morphological rules or peculiarities, such as sandhi).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “word stem” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.