Other forms: vocabularies
Your vocabulary is all the words you know. The ones you say every day, the ones you understand on the page but never use out loud, and the twenty you learned last week and half remember.
A vocabulary is also the list itself: a textbook unit ends with the vocabulary for that chapter, and teachers set vocabulary tests on Friday. Every field has one — legal vocabulary, the vocabulary of football commentary. Teachers split yours in two: active vocabulary is what you can produce, passive vocabulary is what you recognise when you meet it, and the passive half is always the bigger one. The verbs that go with it are build, expand and widen — you build a vocabulary the way you build muscle. The short form is vocab, which is what students actually say.
1nounvocabularyAll the words a person knows or uses.~18%
“Reading widened her vocabulary faster than any list.”
2nounlanguageThe words of a language or a subject, especially gathered as a list to learn.~64%
“The chapter ends with the vocabulary for ordering food.”
3nounrangeThe range of forms available in an art or a craft.~18%
“Concrete and glass make up the whole vocabulary of the building.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
vocabulary is a body of words.
Medieval Latin
vocābulārium
English, today
vocabulary
Learned borrowing from Medieval Latin vocābulārium. a doublet of vocabularium.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA