Auto-Joining Members of a Lemma

WordList > auto-joining lemmas

The menu option Auto-Join can be used to specify a string such as S or S;ED;ING and will then go through the whole word list, lemmatising all entries where one word only differs from the next by having S or ED or ING on the end of it. (Use ; to separate multiple suffixes.)

Prefix / Suffix / Infix

By default all strings typed in are assumed to be suffixes; to join prefixes put an asterisk (*) at the right end of the prefix. If you want to search for infixes (eg. bloody in absobloodylutely [languages like Swahili use infixes a lot]) put an asterisk at each end.

Examples

S;ED;ING will join books to book, booked to book and booking to book

*S;*ED;*ING will join books to book, booked to book and booking to book

UN*;ED;ING will join undo to do, booked to book and booking to book

*BLOODY* will join absobloodylutely to absolutely

The process can be left to run quickly and automatically, or you can have it confirm with you before joining each one. Automatic lemmatisation, like search-and-replace spell-checking, can produce oddities if just left to run!

To stop in the middle of auto-joining, press Escape.

Tip

With a previously saved list, try auto-joining without confirming the changes (or choose Yes to All during it). Then choose the Alphabetical (as opposed to Frequency) version of the list and sort on Lemmas (by pressing the Lemmas heading). You will see all the joined entries at the top of the list. It may be easier to Unjoin (Ctrl + F4) any mistakes than to confirm each one...  Finally, sort on the Word and save.

See also: Lemmatisation