lèxic

Lèxic is a term used in linguistics to denote the full set of lexical items of a language or dialect, that is, its lexicon. It includes words, multiword expressions, idioms, and collocations, along with their meanings, grammatical properties, and typical usage in different contexts. The lèxic interacts with other levels of language, and its study overlaps with semantics, morphology, and syntax in understanding how words form meaning and function in discourse.

The concept is dynamic: new terms enter a language through borrowing, invention, or semantic shift, while others fall out of use. Lexical variation occurs across dialects, sociolects, and registers, leading to regional vocabularies and specialized vocabularies in fields such as technology or medicine. The term lèxic is used in Catalan and other Romance languages with cognate forms in Spanish léxico, French lexique, Italian lessico, and Portuguese léxico. The English equivalent is lexicon.

Two related disciplines are lexicography, the practical compilation of dictionaries and other reference works, and lexicology, the scientific study of the vocabulary of a language and its structure. Modern lexicography increasingly relies on corpus data and computational methods to describe and organize lexical knowledge, including semantic relations, collocations, and frequency information.

See also: lexicon, lexicography, lexicology, vocabulary.