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A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be ...
A word family is the base form of a word plus its inflected forms and derived forms made with suffixes and prefixes [1] plus its cognates, i.e. all words that have a common etymological origin, some of which even native speakers don't recognize as being related (e.g. "wrought (iron)" and "work(ed)"). [2]
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. A modern english thesaurus. A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms ...
The words listed below are frequently used in ways that major English dictionaries do not condone in any definition. See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries.
As a result, estimates vary from 10,000 to 17,000 word families [15] [18] or 17,000-42,000 dictionary words for young adult native speakers of English. [ 11 ] [ 16 ] A 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas , ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the ...
The Teacher Word Book contains 30,000 lemmas or ~13,000 word families (Goulden, Nation and Read, 1990). A corpus of 18 million written words was hand analysed. The size of its source corpus increased its usefulness, but its age, and language changes, have reduced its applicability ( Nation 1997 ).
The dictionary is not based on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – it is a separate dictionary which strives to represent faithfully the current usage of English words. The Revised Second Edition contains 355,000 words, phrases, and definitions, including biographical references and thousands of encyclopaedic entries.
A defining vocabulary is a list of words used by lexicographers to write dictionary definitions. The underlying principle goes back to Samuel Johnson's notion that words should be defined using 'terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained', [1] and a defining vocabulary provides the lexicographer with a restricted list of high-frequency words which can be used for producing simple ...