A specific inflected form of a word; compare lexeme.
"The dictionary entry shows that amare and amavi are two different forms of the same lex, meaning they share an identical underlying lemma despite their distinct grammatical shapes."
In plain English: Lex is another word for law, referring to the rules that govern society and must be followed by everyone.
"The ancient Romans revered lex as an essential foundation for their legal system."
To perform lexical analysis; to convert a character stream to a token stream as a preliminary to parsing.
"The compiler's first phase performs lex to transform the raw source code characters into a sequence of meaningful tokens before parsing begins."
In plain English: To lex means to turn spoken language into written text by typing it out on a computer.
"The new law will lex any company that breaks safety regulations next month."
Usage: This term belongs exclusively to computer science and linguistics; avoid using it in general conversation or non-technical writing. When referring to the abstract concept, prefer "lexeme" rather than the noun sense of this word.
Lexington.
"The historic battle took place in lex, where colonial militia faced British troops."
The word lexical comes directly from Latin via French, originally referring to words or vocabulary rather than the grammatical study of them. It entered English usage specifically through the technical process known as lexical analysis in computing and linguistics.