The term vocabulary (from the Latin vocabularium) denotes a dictionary or the sum of words in use, a person's word stock, or a language's lexicon. In English, the same concept is simply "vocabulary," as in: "Reading helps to widen your vocabulary."
Modern linguistics distinguishes two kinds of vocabulary:
- Active vocabulary — words a person regularly uses in speech and writing;
- Passive vocabulary — words a person recognizes when reading or listening, but doesn't use themselves. Passive vocabulary is usually several times larger than active vocabulary.
In early-1990s Russia, the average educated person had a passive vocabulary of around 75,000-81,000 words. Meanwhile, standard literary Russian contains roughly 50,000 roots and tens of thousands of derived words, and Vladimir Dal's famous «Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language» contains about 200,000 words.
Defining vocabulary
A special term is defining vocabulary — a special glossary lexicographers use to write dictionary definitions. Its core idea traces back to Samuel Johnson's principle that words should be defined using "terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained."
A defining vocabulary is a limited list of frequently occurring words (usually 2,000-3,000) that dictionary compilers use to write definitions for all other words. This approach is especially common in dictionaries for foreign-language learners.
The first dictionary to use a defining vocabulary was Michael West and James Endicott's «New Method English Dictionary» (1935), which relied on just 1,490 words. Modern learner's dictionaries of English use defining vocabularies of 2,000 to 3,000 words.
In 1990s Russia, a period of active engagement with foreign languages and teaching methods, the concept of a defining vocabulary began making its way into Russian lexicography and language pedagogy.
Notably, while the average person's passive vocabulary runs to tens of thousands of words, everyday communication actively draws on a much smaller set — the roughly 6,000 most common words in Russian cover more than 90% of all text.