In
linguistics, a 'stem' is the part of a word that is common to all its
inflected variants. Stems are often
roots, i.e. atomic (unanalyzable)
lexical morphemes, but a stem can also be morphologically complex, as seen with
compound words (cf. the compound nouns ''meat ball'' or ''bottle opener'') or words with
derivational morphemes (cf. the derived verbs ''black-en'' or ''standard-ize''). Thus, the stem of the complex English noun