vocabolari

Vocabolario is an Italian term that commonly denotes both vocabulary and dictionaries. In everyday language, it refers to the set of words that a person knows or to the collective lexicon of a language. In lexicography and language reference works, vocabolario describes a published collection of words, usually presented as lemmas with information such as definitions, grammatical category, pronunciation, etymology, and usage examples. Dictionaries can be described as vocabolari (plural) when referring to multiple works or to a general stock of words.

Etymology and scope: the word comes from Latin vocabularium, from vocabulum or vocabulus meaning “word” or “name,” and entered Italian as vocabolario. The concept underpins both everyday language planning and scholarly lexicography, tracing how words are formed, recorded, and described over time.

Applications in linguistics and education: a vocabolario may refer to the full lexicon of a language or to a specific domain’s terminology. General vocabolari focus on high‑frequency words and common usage, while specialized glossaries or technical vocabolari compile terms from particular fields. Entries typically include part of speech, semantic sense, examples, etymology, and cross‑references to related words.

In technology and natural language processing, the term vocabulary (vocabolario) denotes the set of tokens recognized by a model. A fixed vocal set can influence text encoding, with approaches like subword units used to manage out-of-vocabulary items and to improve linguistic coverage.

Overall, vocabolario is a foundational concept in language description, education, and computational linguistics, linking the practical knowledge of words with their codified representations in dictionaries and language models.