vocabulaire

Vocabulaire is a term used in linguistics and language pedagogy to denote the set of words known and used by a speaker or the lexicon of a language. In French, the word vocabulaire also functions as the general reference to this concept. The concept derives from Latin vocabulum meaning “word, name” and is often used interchangeably with “lexicon” or “lexique” in French.

The vocabulary of a language comprises lemmas and their inflected forms, examples, collocations, idioms, and fixed expressions. It can be broken down into active (productive) vocabulary, which a speaker uses in speech and writing, and passive (receptive) vocabulary, which is recognized and understood but not easily produced. Specialized or technical vocabularies cover particular domains such as science, law, or medicine, while general vocabulary spans everyday usage. Size and composition vary by individual, proficiency, and domain, with active vocabulary typically smaller than receptive.

Vocabulary is acquired through exposure, reading, listening, and explicit study, with effective learners expanding both breadth and depth by learning high-frequency items and common collocations. Frequency lists and corpora are used to estimate vocabulary size and guide pedagogy. In technology, lexical resources, such as frequency dictionaries and lexical databases, support language learning, natural language processing, and educational software.

In education, knowledge of vocabulary is linked to reading comprehension and oral fluency. Differences across dialects and languages lead to variation in vocabularies and in the way words are formed, borrowed, or reused. The concept of vocabulaire also informs discussions of multilingualism, translation, and lexical borrowing between languages.