In linguistics, the lexicon (or wordstock) of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" (lexicon), neut. of "λεξικός" (lexikos), "of or for words",[1] from "λέξις" (lexis), "speech", "word",[2] and that from "λέγω" (lego), "to say", "to speak".[3]
The lexicon includes the lexemes that together form words. Lexemes are formed according to morpho-syntactic rules and express sememes. The lexicon is generally thought to be a static dictionary rather that a collection of rules. This dictionary contains both vocabulary organized in one or more ways (e.g. all the foods a person knows may be linked in a neural net). The lexicon is also linked to a generative device which combine morphemes according to a language's rules. For example, the suffix '-able' can be added to transitive verbs only, so that we get 'read-able' but not 'cry-able'.
A lexicon is usually considered to be a container for words belonging to a single language. In other words, multi-lingual speakers are generally thought to have multiple lexicons. Speakers of language variants (e.g. Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese) may be considered to possess a single lexicon.
When linguists study the lexicon, they study such things as what constitutes a word; the word-concept relationship; lexical access and lexical access failure; how a word's phonology, syntax, and meaning intersect; the morphology-word relationship; vocabulary structure within a given language; language use (i.e. pragmatics); language acquisition; the history and evolution of words (i.e. etymology); and the relationships between words, often studied within philosophy of language.
In psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics, researchers have proposed various models of how the lexicon is organized and how words are retrieved.
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