| 1. | the spoken form a word has when produced in isolation, such as when cited for purposes of illustration, as distinguished from the form it would have when produced in the normal stream of speech. |
| 2. | the form of a lexical set that represents its entire inflectional paradigm in linguistic discussions and dictionary entries: “Be” is the citation form for “be,” “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” “been.” |