Ordmængde

Ordmængde is the total set of words that a person knows and can use. In linguistics and language education, it is a measure of vocabulary size, also referred to as the lexicon size. The term can describe an individual’s knowledge or the diversity of words in a text or corpus. Because many words have inflected forms, researchers often count lemmas (base forms) rather than every form to estimate underlying knowledge. Distinctions are made between active (productive) vocabulary and receptive (passive) vocabulary, and between the number of different words (types) and the total number of word occurrences (tokens) in a sample.

Measurement methods include targeted vocabulary tests, such as multiple-choice or gap-filling tasks, and corpus-based estimates that infer size from text coverage or type-token ratios. In applied contexts, ordmængde is used to assess language proficiency, to tailor instruction, and to study reading comprehension and listening skills. An individual’s ordmængde tends to be larger in reading and writing than in speaking, and larger for receptive knowledge than for productive use.

Developmentally, ordmængde grows with age, schooling, and exposure to varied language input. In Danish and other morphologically rich languages, counting lemmas helps control for many surface forms created by inflection. The concept remains a practical, though imperfect, proxy for overall language competence in research and education.