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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