Lexicology

A dialect is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standardized varieties as well as vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardized varieties, such as those used in developing countries or isolated areas. The dialects of the same language are mainly distinguished from each other by differences in linguistic features such as phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary.

In linguistics, a neologism (, ; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has gained popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language.

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Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. In American Sign Language, pronunciation describes how a sign is constructed.

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition.

In language, an archaism is a word, a sense of a word, or a style of speech or writing that belongs to a historical epoch beyond living memory, but that has survived in a few practical settings or affairs. Lexical archaisms are single archaic words or expressions used regularly in an affair (e.g. religion or law) or freely; literary archaism is the survival of archaic language in a traditional literary text such as a nursery rhyme or the deliberate use of a style characteristic of an earlier age—for example, in his 1960 novel The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth writes in an 18th-century style. Arc

thumb|upright=1.25|Punch (magazine)|Punch, 25 February 1914. The cartoon is a pun on the word "Jamaica", which pronunciation is a [[homonym to the clipped form of "Did you make her?" ]]

In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as phrasemes), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than, or otherwise not predictable from, the sum of their meanings when used independently. For example, ‘Dutch auction’ is composed of the words Dutch ‘of or pertaining to the Netherlands’ and auction ‘a public sale in which goods are sold to the highest bidder’, but its meaning is not ‘a sale in the Netherlands where goods ar

In philosophy and linguistics, the denotation of a word or expression is its strictly literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning, in particular connotation. For instance, the word "warm" may evoke calmness, coziness, or kindness (as in the warmth of someone's personality) but these associations are not part of the word's denotation. Similarly, an expression's denotation is separate from pragmatic inferences it may trigger. For instance, describing something as "warm" often implic

Onomasiology (from onomāzο 'to name', which in turn is from ὄνομα onoma 'name') is a branch of linguistics concerned with the question "how do you express X?" It is in fact most commonly understood as a branch of lexicology, the study of words (although some apply the term also to grammar and conversation).

form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage

A malapropism (; also called a malaprop, acyrologia or Dogberryism) is the incorrect use of a word in place of a word with a similar sound, either unintentionally or for comedic effect, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance. An example is the statement attributed to baseball player Yogi Berra, regarding switch hitters, "He hits from both sides of the plate. He's amphibious", with the accidental use of amphibious rather than the intended ambidextrous. Malapropisms often occur as errors in natural speech and are sometimes the subject of media attention, especially when made by pol

thumb | right | Cover of the October 1905 issue of Jabberwock: a Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless.

Cacography is bad spelling or bad handwriting. The term in the sense of "poor spelling, accentuation, and punctuation" is a semantic antonym to orthography, and in the sense of "poor handwriting" it is an etymological antonym to the word calligraphy: cacography is from Greek κακός (kakos "bad") and γραφή (graphe "writing").

linguistic concept

Slavicisms or Slavisms are words and expressions (lexical, grammatical, phonetic, etc.) borrowed or derived from Slavic languages.

In linguistics, a protologism is a newly used or coined word, a nonce word, that has been repeated but has not gained acceptance beyond its original users or been published independently of the coiners. The word may be proposed, may be extremely new, or may be established only within a very limited group of people.

thumb|Cafe chalkboard advertising a "pre fixed" menu, an eggcorn of the French prix fixe (fixed price)

learned society on linguistics

Lexicometry is the quantitative study of the lexicon, using statistical methods, studying a corpus of texts, based mainly on the frequency of use of the words that are part of it.

A cultureme is any portion of cultural behavior apprehended in signs of symbolic value that can be broken down into smaller units or amalgamated into larger ones. A cultureme is a "cultural information-bearing unit", the contents of which are recognizable by a group of people. Culturemes are the bridge between linguistic units and culture.