---
id: snowballstemmer
version: "3.1.1"
license: BSD-3-Clause
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# snowballstemmer — This package provides 36 stemmers for 34 languages generated from Snowball algorithms.

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Popularity: top 1,000 on PyPI

## Install

pip install snowballstemmer
uv add snowballstemmer
poetry add snowballstemmer

## Description

Snowball stemming library collection for Python
===============================================

Python 3 (>= 3.3) is supported.  We no longer support Python 2 as the Python
developers stopped supporting it at the start of 2020.  Snowball 2.1.0 was the
last release to officially support Python 2; Snowball 3.0.1 was the last
release which had the code to support Python 2, but we were no longer testing
it.

What is Stemming?
-----------------

Stemming maps different forms of the same word to a common "stem" - for
example, the English stemmer maps *connection*, *connections*, *connective*,
*connected*, and *connecting* to *connect*.  So a search for *connected*
would also find documents which only have the other forms.

This stem form is often a word itself, but this is not always the case as this
is not a requirement for text search systems, which are the intended field of
use.  We also aim to conflate words with the same meaning, rather than all
words with a common linguistic root (so *awe* and *awful* don't have the same
stem), and over-stemming is more problematic than under-stemming so we tend not
to stem in cases that are hard to resolve.  If you want to always reduce...

## AI interpretation — verify before relying

Provides 36 stemmers for 34 languages that reduce word variants to common stems for text search and indexing applications.

Verdict: Production-ready stemming library with broad language support, zero dependencies, and active maintenance. Pure Python implementation trades performance for portability; consider PyStemmer for speed-critical applications. No known vulnerabilities and permissive licensing make it safe for most use cases.

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/snowballstemmer) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/snowballstemmer/)