Part of the word containing its essential meaning, which refers to some concept and not a mere grammatical function. For example, in word globalisation, the stem is glob-, which refers to the idea of ‘globe, world, planet Earth’, whereas -al-, -is-, -a- and -tion are suffixes indicating respectively ‘transformation into adjective’ (global), ‘transformation into verb’ (globalise) and ‘transformation into noun’ (globalisation).