Sõnastest

Sõnastest is a term used in Estonian to refer to collections of lexical items, commonly dictionaries, glossaries, or word lists. In lexicography, such resources document vocabulary, including lemmas, forms, meanings, pronunciations, etymologies, and usage notes. Sõnastest may be monolingual (Estonian) or multilingual (for example, Estonian–English word lists) and can vary in scope from general language vocabulary to specialized terminologies in fields like science or technology.

Composition and structure: an entry usually centers on a headword and its grammatical information, senses, inflections, example sentences, and sometimes etymology and pronunciation. Some lists include frequency data or regional variants.

Creation and maintenance: word lists are compiled from corpus data, dictionaries, and expert input. They undergo editorial and linguistic review to ensure accuracy and consistency, and they may be revised as language use evolves. Digital dictionaries and language technologies rely on sizeable sõnastest databases for tasks such as spell checking, morphological analysis, and machine translation.

Applications: such resources support language learning and teaching, lexicography research, natural language processing, indexing and search, and digital humanities. They also enable data-driven studies of vocabulary change, regional variation, and terminology formation.

Relation to related concepts: sõnastest are closely linked to orthography, grammar, phonology, etymology, and corpus linguistics. In Estonia, as in many languages, word lists underpin standard language reference, modern spelling, and language technology development.

See also: lexicography, dictionaries, corpus linguistics, Wiktionary.