Sõnavarast

Sõnavarast is an Estonian inflected form of the noun sõnavara, meaning "vocabulary" or "lexicon." Morphologically it is the elative singular (suffix -st) and is commonly translated as "from the vocabulary" or "out of the lexicon." The form combines the stem sõnavara (sõna "word" + vara "stock, store") with the elative case marker that denotes origin, separation or source.

In use, sõnavarast appears in contexts that indicate something taken, absent, or derived from a body of words. Examples include expressions like "sõnavarast leida" ("to find in the vocabulary"), "puudub sõnavarast" ("is missing from the vocabulary"), or "võetud sõnavarast" ("taken from the lexicon"). It is used both for concrete lists of words (a learner’s vocabulary) and for abstract lexical resources (a language’s lexicon or register).

The form is relevant in linguistics, language teaching and lexicography when discussing sources of words, loanwords, registers, or gaps in a speaker’s active vocabulary. It is one of many case-marked forms in Estonian that allow compact expression of relationships between nouns and verbs without prepositions. Related base forms include sõnavara (nominative) and other case forms such as sõnavaras, sõnavarasse and sõnavaral, which mark different spatial or abstract relations.