lexicologists

Lexicologists are linguists who study the lexicon, the set of all words and fixed expressions in a language, and how they interact within the mental lexicon and in discourse. Their scope includes the forms of words (morphology), their meanings (semantics), and the ways in which words relate to one another—through polysemy, hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy, collocation, and idiomatic use. They examine how words are created and change over time (etymology and historical lexicology), as well as how social factors influence usage and lexical variation across dialects and registers.

They rely on data from corpora, dictionaries, etymological records, and language databases; methods from corpus linguistics, semantic modeling, and computational tools help analyze frequency, sense distribution, collocations, and semantic networks. The field encompasses theoretical and applied strands, including cognitive aspects of mental lexicon organization and computational linguistics, which informs natural language processing and language technology.

Often overlapping with lexicography, the practical discipline of dictionary compilation, lexicologists contribute theoretical foundations about word meaning, sense distinctions, and lexical relations that lexicographers use when describing a language in reference works and databanks. They also study terminology, specialized vocabularies in domains such as science and technology, and language change in historical corpora.

Professionals typically hold degrees in linguistics, philology, or related areas, with advanced training in semantics, morphology, corpus linguistics, and lexicography. They work in universities, research institutes, dictionary publishers, tech companies developing language technologies, and language planning or education projects.