Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun All the words of a language.
  • noun The sum of words used by, understood by, or at the command of a particular person or group.
  • noun A list of words and often phrases, usually arranged alphabetically and defined or translated; a lexicon or glossary.
  • noun A supply of expressive means; a repertoire of communication.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A list or collection of the words of a language, a dialect, a single work or author, a nomenclature, or the like, arranged usually in alphabetical order and briefly defined and explained; a glossary; a word-book; a dictionary or lexicon: as, a vocabulary of Anglo-Indian words; a vocabulary of technical terms; a vocabulary of Virgil.
  • noun The words of a language; the sum or stock of words employed in a language, or by a particular person; range of language.
  • noun Synonyms Vocabulary, Dictionary, Glossary, Lexicon, Nomenclature. A vocabudary, in the present use, is a list of words occurring in a specific work or author, generally arranged alphabetically, concisely defined, and appended to the text; whereas we generally apply the term dictionary to a word-book of all the words in a language or in any department of art or science, without reference to any particular work: thus, we speak of a vocabxdary to Cæsar, but of a dictionary of the Latin language, or of architecture, chemistry, etc. An exception to this may be where the words of an author are so fully treated, by derivation, illustration, etc., as to seem to amount to more than a vocabulary: as, a Homeric dictionary. A glossary is yet more restricted than a vocabulary, being a list and explanation of such terms in a work or author as are peculiar, as by being technical, dialectal, or antiquated: as, a glossary to Chaucer, Burns, etc; a glossary of terms of art, philosophy, etc. Lexicon was originally and is often still confined to dictionaries of the Greek or Hebrew tongues, but it is also freely applied to a dictionary of any dead or merely foreign language: as, a German-English lexicon. A nomenclature is a complete list of the names or technical terms belonging to any one division or subdivision of science.
  • noun Idiom, Diction, etc. See langwage.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A list or collection of words arranged in alphabetical order and explained; a dictionary or lexicon, either of a whole language, a single work or author, a branch of science, or the like; a word-book.
  • noun A sum or stock of words employed.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A usually alphabetized and explained collection of words e.g. of a particular field, or prepared for a specific purpose, often for learning.
  • noun The collection of words a person knows and uses.
  • noun The stock of words used in a particular field.
  • noun The words of a language collectively.
  • noun A range of artistic or stylistic forms or techniques

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a language user's knowledge of words
  • noun the system of techniques or symbols serving as a means of expression (as in arts or crafts)
  • noun a listing of the words used in some enterprise

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French vocabulaire, from Old French, from Medieval Latin vocābulārium, from neuter of vocābulārius, of words, from Latin vocābulum, name; see vocable.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Late Latin vocabularium, vocabularius: French vocabulaire. See vocable.

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Examples

  • Written for the ‘Orca Sports Series’, this high-interest mystery moves at a fast pace but the vocabulary is appropriate for the reluctant reader.

    Books 2010

  • Written for the ‘Orca Sports Series’, this high-interest mystery moves at a fast pace but the vocabulary is appropriate for the reluctant reader.

    Reviews 2010

  • Written for the ‘Orca Sports Series’, this high-interest mystery moves at a fast pace but the vocabulary is appropriate for the reluctant reader.

    Selections 2010

  • This subset of our vocabulary is a tiny core of useful words.

    building up vocabulary Dean Francis Alfar 2005

  • Very importantly, this vocabulary is also used normatively.

    IsThatLegal? 2004

  • Significant of the change taking place in the vocabulary is the author's statement that he has in a great measure shun'd the old Saxon words, as finding them growing every day more obsolete than ever. '

    On Dictionaries 1969

  • Significant of the change taking place in the vocabulary is the author's statement that he has in a great measure shun'd the old Saxon words, as finding them growing every day more obsolete than ever. '

    On Dictionaries 1924

  • Table of Contents: Boolean retrieval The term vocabulary and postings lists Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval Index construction Index compression Scoring, term weighting and the vector space model Computing scores in a complete search system Evaluation in information retrieval Relevance feedback and query expansion XML retrieval Probabilistic information retrieval Language models for information retrieval Text classification and Naive Bayes Vector space classification Support vector machines and machine learning on documents Flat clustering Hierarchical clustering Matrix decompositions and latent semantic indexing Web search basics Web crawling and indexes Link analysis I just saw and ordered Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice by Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler,

    Classifieds, Shopping Malls and More - Craigs List News and Articles 2009

  • This kind of vocabulary is used descriptively, as in names of weapons, like the 'Minuteman,' and as in terms such as 'supersonic,' 'hair-trigger,' all of which convey great and nimble speed.

    IsThatLegal? 2004

  • Whether or not I want to adopt the same vocabulary is up to me.

    Ensename, por favor! 2009

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