Koine Greek/8

8. The Stem of a word is that part of it which remains substantially unchanged through varieties of inflection. Nouns, Adjectives and Pronouns are 'declined'; Verbs are 'conjugated' by the help of prefixes or terminations added to the stem, which may itself be variously modified, but can always be traced, and contains the main idea of the word. To know this Stem, therefore, is an essential preliminary to the study of the inflections.

The stems of words shall in this section be distinguished by dark letters, and in general by an appended hyphen, as the stem in itself is incomplete, requiring some kind of addition before it becomes a word.