What’s the Term for a Filename Without Its Extension?

Today someone asked in OCaml’s Discord “How do you call a variable that refers to a filename without its extension?”. I always thought there was no specific term for this and I always named such variables filename-sans-extension (or similar), but it turns out I was wrong. It’s never too late to learning something new! But first a bit of (subjective) terminology:

• /path/to/some_file.foo - filepath
• /path/to - directory
• some_file.foo - filename/basename
• foo - extension
• some_file - ???

I hope that makes things clear. Now we can proceed!

So what’s the term we’re looking for? Turns out it’s stem and it’s present in a few popular programming languages:

• C++ (std::filesystem lib)
• Python
• Rust

Why stem? While I can’t be sure I’d say it’s either a nod to the tree terminology that’s pretty pervasive when we’re talking about directories, or a nod to linguistics:

In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question.

If I had to guess - probably the term originated with C++, given it’s the oldest language I could find that’s using it. If someone knows the origin of the stem terminology, please do share! At any rate - I kind of like it and I’ll probably use stem or the more descriptive file_stem going forward.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!