It is intended to be a general English lexicon that includes many biomedical terms.
Coverage includes both commonly occurring English words and biomedical vocabulary.
The lexical variant generation programs are designed to address the high degree of variability in natural language words and terms. Words often have several inflected forms which would properly be considered instances of the same word. Multi-word terms in the Metathesaurus and other controlled vocabularies may have word order variants in addition to their inflectional and alphabetic case variants. The purpose of the lexical variant generation programs is to help the user abstract away from this sort of variation. Lexical entries may be single or multi-word terms.