ordlister

Ordlister are lists of words used in linguistics, education, lexicography, and natural language processing. They can be monolingual or multilingual and are commonly organized alphabetically, by frequency, by semantic domain, or by morphological properties. The term ordlister is Danish in origin and translates to "word lists." In other languages the same concept is referred to as word lists or lexicons, depending on scope and usage.

Ordlister are typically constructed from existing linguistic resources such as corpora, dictionaries, or teacher-curated inventories. Common variants include frequency lists that rank words by usage, orthographic lists that group items by spelling patterns, morphological or lemmatized lists that reduce inflected forms to base lemmas, and domain-specific lists that collect technical terms or proper names. In computational contexts, word lists may serve as lexicons for tagging, as stopword sets for filtering, or as input for spell-checkers and search engines.

Applications include language learning and teaching, dictionary compilation, text analysis, search optimization, and various natural language processing tasks. Word lists enable researchers to study vocabulary size and distribution, support vocabulary acquisition, and provide resources for managing low-resource languages. They are also used to annotate corpora and to benchmark NLP systems.

Limitations and considerations: word lists reflect source data and time of compilation; dialect, register, and orthographic conventions influence content. They may omit multiword expressions or proper nouns, and their usefulness depends on size, granularity, and intended domain. See also frequency lists, lexicons, and corpora.