The commonly accepted definition of the base is that of McCarthy and Prince (1993), which states that if a morpheme is a prefix, the base is the following segments, and if it is a suffix, the base is the preceding segments. I argue against this definition, which I refer to as the single-side definition, in favor of a definition which takes everything in the output, excepting the morpheme under consideration, to be the base. I show that the single-side definition is not able to always pick out the correct base and that it is unclear how the single-side defintion of the base could be implemented in Optimality Theory. I propose that stipulation of a particular base is unnecessary as well as problematic. By adopting the proposed definition the identification of the base is both simplified, as the base does not change depending on whether the reduplicant is a prefix or a suffix, and does not incur the problems encountered by the standardly assumed definition.