the.com/lexicon
every word you own, a vault of meaning you didn't know you were curating.
means A lexicon is the complete vocabulary of a language, a field, or a single person — every word available to be used.
from Straight from Greek 'lexikon,' a neuter form of 'lexikos' meaning 'of words,' built on 'lexis' (word, speech), which grows from the verb 'legein,' to speak. That same 'legein' is a busy ancestor — it also feeds 'logos' and a whole family of '-logy' words. So a lexicon is, quite literally, a 'thing of words,' arriving in English by way of scholarly Latin around the 17th century, when it first meant a dictionary for ancient languages.
- original meaning
- Greek for the book of words itself
- adult size
- natives know roughly 20,000 to 35,000 words
- passive vs active
- you understand far more than you ever say
- mental vault
- brain retrieves a word in milliseconds
- living thing
- new words enter dictionaries every single year
for instance
oxford english dictionary — comprehensive english lexicon with 600,000+ words, first published 1884