archilexeme [Grk archí—‘main, chief,’ léxis ‘word’]

Introduced by B.Pottier, the term (coined in analogy to archiphoneme) refers to a word whose meaning can be identified in relation to the collective meaning of the lexical field. The archilexeme of birch, ash, maple, etc. is tree, whose meaning is identical to the meaning of all the elements of the semantic field taken together. An archilexeme does not necessarily have to be the same part of speech as the other words in the particular lexical field. In other cases, a lexical field, such as the adjectives of temperature in English, may be lacking an archilexeme. ( also hyperonymy)

Reference

Pottier, B. 1963. Recherches sur l’analyse sémantique en linguistique et en traduction mécanique. Paris.