vocabulary

Definition

A vocabulary is the complete set of words and phrases that one or more parties have at their disposal for reasoning and communicating about any topic. Since they are often interested in specific topics, terminologies may be subsets of their vocabularies.

Purpose

In order for parties to properly reason and/or communicate, they need a set of terms (and a semantics to provide their meanings).

Criteria

A vocabulary is the set of words and phrases (including terms) one or more parties use for reasoning and communicating about anything they like.

Examples

• The set of words that you know is your vocabulary.
• The set of words listed in an English dictionary is a vocabulary of the English language (of its authoring organization)

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