lexically

Lexically is an adverb relating to lexicon, vocabulary, or the set of words in a language. It is used to describe properties that concern word meaning or word-level form rather than syntax or phonology. In linguistics, statements about something being lexically determined or lexically driven refer to aspects tied to lexical items—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other content words—rather than to grammatical rules.

The word lexical derives from the adjective lexical, which in turn traces to lexis meaning word or speech (ultimately from Greek). The adverb is formed by adding the suffix -ly to the adjective lexical. In everyday and scholarly usage, lexically oriented analysis focuses on words and their meanings, rather than on sentence structure or phonetic form.

In linguistic analysis, lexical aspects are contrasted with syntactic aspects. Lexical semantics studies word meanings, senses, reference, polysemy, and the relationships among words within a language. Phrases such as lexically ambiguous or lexically dense describe phenomena at the word level—for example, words with multiple senses or a text rich in content words relative to function words.

In computing and programming language theory, lexical is also used in contexts such as lexical analysis (tokenization) and lexical scoping, where rules are determined by the textual structure of code rather than by dynamic or runtime scope. Overall, lexically concerns the vocabulary and word-level properties that shape meaning and interpretation.