Vocabulary

How to spell vocabulary

10 letters · 5 syllables

2 of the 28 people asked to spell vocabulary in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce vocabulary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vocabulary mean?

1. nounThe body of words a person knows or that exists within a particular language or field.

Vocabulary in a sentence

• Reading widely steadily expanded her vocabulary over the years.

• The medical textbook introduced a specialised vocabulary in its first chapter.

Where does vocabulary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin vocabulum, meaning 'a name' or 'a word', which was built on the verb vocare, 'to call', and ultimately on vox, 'voice'. In Medieval Latin this gave rise to vocabularium, a noun meaning a list or collection of words, the sort a scholar might compile. English took the word in during the 1500s, partly through French, first to mean such a word-list and later to mean the whole stock of words a person or language possesses. The same vocare root still echoes in everyday relatives like 'vocal', 'voice', and 'invoke', all of which trace back to the idea of calling out. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the unstressed 'a' in the second syllable (vo-CA-bu-la-ry) is a faint schwa that writers easily drop or swap, and the '-ary' ending can tempt an '-ery' instead.

How the word is built

• vocabul- (from Latin vocabulum: a name or word)
• -ary (noun-forming suffix denoting a collection or body)