Leipzig Glossing Rules explained
The three lines
An interlinear gloss has three lines. The top line is the object language, the text you are analyzing. The middle line is the gloss, which labels each piece of the text. The bottom line is a free translation in running English. The first two lines stay tightly aligned; the translation reads naturally and sits in quotation marks.
Align the words
Each word in the object line sits directly above its gloss, lined up at the left edge. A reader should be able to drop straight down from any word to the label that explains it. In a visual editor this happens automatically, because each word is its own box and the gloss box sits under it.
One hyphen per morpheme boundary
When a word splits into morphemes, separate them with hyphens in the object line, and use the same number of hyphens in the gloss. So a word with two hyphens is glossed with two hyphens, and every piece has a partner. The Turkish oda-dan glossed room-ABL keeps one hyphen on each side. The matching count is what makes the gloss readable.
Grammatical category labels
Grammatical morphemes get a short label rather than a translation. Case, tense, person, and number are written as abbreviations, traditionally in small capitals: NOM for nominative, PST for past, 1SG for first-person singular. Lexical morphemes keep a plain translation, like “house” or “run”. Person, number, and gender combine without periods, so first-person singular is 1SG, not 1.SG.
The full set of common labels lives on the glossing abbreviations cheat sheet.
One form, several meanings
Sometimes one morpheme answers to several English words or several grammatical meanings. Join them with a period so the gloss still counts as one piece. The Turkish verb çık glossed come.out uses a period because English needs two words for one stem. The same period appears inside a label like PST.FEM when one ending carries both meanings at once.
Reduplication, zero, and stem changes
A few more marks handle the cases a plain hyphen cannot:
- A tilde marks reduplication, a copied syllable or stem, as in the Tagalog bi~bili glossed IPFV~buy.
- An overt ø stands for a morpheme that has meaning but no sound, as in the Latin puer-ø glossed boy-NOM.
- A backslash marks a category shown by a change inside the word, as in the German father\PL umlaut plural.
- Angle brackets mark an infix, a morpheme inserted inside the stem.
Clitics
A clitic is a small word that leans on a neighbor, like the French object pronoun in Je t’aime. Where a hyphen marks a piece inside a word, an equals sign marks a clitic boundary, so the clitic gets its own gloss while staying attached to its host.
Gloss it yourself
Stack a source line, a gloss line, and a translation, mark your morpheme boundaries, then draw the alignment and export it as PNG, SVG, or PDF for a paper, a grammar, or a slide.