vocabular

Vocabular is a term used in several languages to refer to the collection of words known or used by a person or by a language community. In English, the standard term is vocabulary, while vocabular appears as a cognate in other languages such as Romanian and in some technical or historical contexts. The concept describes the lexical repertoire available to a speaker or writer, including word meanings, forms, and related knowledge such as collocations and register.

In linguistic and educational usage, vocabular is closely associated with the lexicon of a language. It encompasses not only individual words but also phrases, idioms, and terminological terms specific to a field. Linguists distinguish between active (productive) vocabulary—words a person can readily use in speech or writing—and passive (receptive) vocabulary—words recognized and understood but not frequently produced. Similarly, vocabulary can be described in terms of breadth (the number of known words) and depth (the range of information or associations a word carries, such as synonyms, antonyms, collocations, and nuances).

Vocabulary development is central to language learning and literacy. It proceeds through exposure, instruction, reading, and discourse, with measurements often based on word recognition, production, or frequency-based assessments. In education, emphasis may fall on core vocabulary, academic or domain-specific vocabulary, and strategies for expanding active use.

In practice, vocabular is linked to related concepts such as lexicon, word lists, and dictionaries. In computational linguistics and natural language processing, lexicons and vocabularies form foundational resources for parsing, search, translation, and language modeling.