Vocab Facts Flashcards
How many words are there in English?
At least 500.000
How many words did Winston Churchill use in his writing?
60.000
How many words does the average native English speaker use in his/ her everyday speech?
5.000
How many words make up 45% of everything written in English?
50
What are collocations?
natural expressions unsed by native speaker
What does paradigmatic mean?
it refers to the way words can be substituted by certain other words (synonyms,…)
What does syntagmatic mean?
it refers to the way words occur in sequences
What are Hyponyms?
Unterbegriff
…words whose meanings are specific instances of a more general hyperonym
-> blue to color
Hyperonym
Oberbegriff
Meronyms
refer to the parts of a whole or holonym
-> tree to forest
Polysemy
words that have meaning
Homonym
words with same spelling and pronounciation but different meaning
-> bank and bank
Homophones
words with same pronounciation, but different spelling and meaning
-> their and they’re
Homographs
words with same spelling but different pronouciation/ meaning
-> wind and wind
Binomials
are expressions in which two words are joined by “and”, “or” etc. and often employ alliteration or assonance
-> rough and ready
Etymology
study of the origin of words
Derivation
Describes the origin of a word
Cognates
words in two or more languages with the same origin
False Friends
words in two or more languages which look or sound similar but have different meanings
Confusables
two or more words odten confused with eacht other by non-native speaker
Compound
word which consists of more than one free morpheme
closed (or solid) form compund
two short words are written together
hyphenated compound
two or more words are linked by hyphens (-)
open (spaced) compound
more recent combination of longer words
