Words / cls.spa.determinante

lo

Identity

Lemma: lo
Part of speech: cls.spa.determinanteread off the URL segment (in turn parsed from the LEXEME id by lib/routes.ts’s posAndLemmaOf), because Lexeme carries no pos field yet (LAN-217/LAN-274). This route is built to prefer node.data.pos as the field once that migration lands; until then, the id is the only source and this line says so rather than hiding it.
Frequency rank: not recorded
Gloss: The invariable determiner that combines with an adjective or a clause to name a quality or a fact rather than a thing, as in lo importante.

Whether this is a separate word from the definite article or the neuter cell of that article's paradigm is disputed, and the record is marked contested for that reason rather than because the facts are unclear. The academy's own grammar states the dispute and then adopts a convention, writing that the polemic remains current and that it is preferable to keep the shape lo inside the paradigm of the articles, as it will do there. The convention adopted here is the opposite one, and it is recorded as a convention and not as a finding: the shape is filed as its own word because it takes no gender and no number, combines with an adjective rather than a noun, and produces a phrase that names a quality rather than an entity. On either reading the shape lo also belongs to the unstressed object pronoun, so the string resolves to two words whichever answer is given to this question.

Sourced from:

Nueva gramática de la lengua española (2009)grammarentryno public licenceretrieved 2026-08-04by Real Academia Española and Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española
A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (Butt and Benjamin)grammarentryno public licenceretrieved 2026-08-04by John Butt and Carmen Benjamin

Paradigm

Non-finite forms (no person, so no coordinate in the five-column grid):

loThe shape both invariable determiners and the unstressed direct object pronoun claim, and the single clearest case of one surface belonging to two words.

Class memberships

has-a edges to CLASS objects (06-surface.md §5.2) — the door back into the grammar. Subsumption (is-a) is not available here: it is same-type-only (A3), so a LEXEME cannot is-a a CLASS.

artículoinherent
determinanteinherent

Examples

Each example declares its dialect and tier, per 06-surface.md §5.2 (“the interface ranks and labels rather than silently mixing registers”).

No examples are recorded for this lexeme (Lexeme.examples is optional; absent key = unstated, per lib/schema/nodes.ts’s own note — never a stub sentence invented to fill the section).

Where the grammar discusses this word

05-vocabulary.md §10.9’s own requirement: “a vocab entry links back to the grammar.” has-a edges to CATEGORY and inbound selects edges, both real graph edges rather than a generated cross-reference.

No CATEGORY membership or selects edge is recorded for this lexeme.