Ordförrådet

Ordförrådet is a Swedish term used in linguistics to denote the total set of words that a person or a language community knows. In everyday language it is often equated with vocabulary, but in scholarly contexts it is treated as a structured store of lexical knowledge that underpins speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The concept encompasses not only individual word meanings but also information about word forms, grammatical properties, and typical collocations.

In linguistic theory, the ordförråd is closely associated with the mental lexicon, the part of the mind where lexical knowledge is stored and retrieved. Entries in the mental lexicon include information about a word’s phonology, meaning, part of speech, inflection, and subcategorization requirements. Words are organized in networks that reflect semantic relations, morpho-syntactic patterns, and frequency of use. Retrieval from the ordförråd is influenced by context, exposure, and frequency, with common words generally accessed more quickly than rare ones.

The size and composition of the ordförråd vary between individuals and develop over a lifetime through reading, conversation, education, and formal training. Measures of vocabulary size, such as receptive (understanding) and productive (using) vocabularies, are used in language acquisition research and education to assess linguistic development and literacy.

In computational linguistics and natural language processing, a lexicon or ordförråd refers to a curated set of word entries used by algorithms for tasks such as parsing, morphological analysis, and word sense disambiguation.