woordveld

Woordveld, in linguistics often translated as semantic field or lexical field, refers to a set of words that belong to a common domain and are semantically related. Members of a woordveld share core meanings and are connected through related concepts, events, or objects. The concept helps describe how vocabularies organize around topics such as nature, food, or weather.

The term is a Dutch compound of woord (word) and veld (field), used to analyze how words cluster by theme rather than by purely grammatical categories. In practice, a woordveld encompasses not only synonyms and hyponyms but also collocations, associations, and functional relationships that arise within a specific domain. Boundaries between fields are often fuzzy and can shift with context, discourse, or cultural usage.

Woordvelden have a characteristic structure: a central or prototypical term, surrounded by more specific or peripheral members. Relationships within a field include hyponymy (a general term and its species), meronymy (part–whole relations), and thematic associations. They also reveal how language encodes knowledge about a domain and influences word choice and discourse.

Applications of the concept occur in education, lexicography, and computational linguistics. In language teaching, organizing vocabulary by woordveld aids memory and comprehension. In dictionaries and thesauri, woordvelden help group related terms. In natural language processing, semantic fields support tasks such as semantic similarity, topic modeling, and text classification by providing domain-based word clusters.

Example: a weather woordveld includes terms like regen, sneeuw, hagel, onweer, bliksem, wind, en weersverwachting. Another common field is voeding, encompassing appels, peren, brood, kaas, en groenten.