This chapter will deal with basic problems of lexicology first; then it will proceed to analyse various types of English dictionaries in order to lead to a better understanding of vocabulary and of how dictionaries are born, built, organised and best used. Both the scientific aspects (words, word-formation and selected vocabularies) and the practical ones — learning to cope with a variety of reference materials concerning English — are very important for professionals in the field of Foreign Languages.(1)

Let us consider these English words: here, antidisestablishmentarianism, boyfriend, NATO, spaghetti.

The first is a short and simple word. The second is recorded in some repertories as the longest English word: it contains establish, a simple word, preceded and followed by a number of elements (anti-, dis-, -ment, -arian, -ism) called affixes. Is the third, boyfriend, one word or two? And is NATO one word or four (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation)? And finally, is spaghetti an English word at all?

Approaching these problems and answering these questions is not just a matter of curiosity. New words and phrases are created every day — sometimes by newspapers to describe new events (e.g. no-fly-zones in Iraq during and after the Gulf War) and sometimes by scientists, technicians or marketing agencies for new discoveries, processes and products. For this reason, understanding word-formation processes is important, not just as a topic in linguistics.

The sources of new words can be either external or internal.

External sources usually take the form of loanwords: these are foreign words that enter a language for any reasons and are assimilated into it; the process is called borrowing. Italian is now borrowing a very large number of words from English; the reverse process has been in force ever since the Renaissance, mostly for words referring to music (concerto, orchestra, violoncello, allegro, andante and many more) and the other arts (stucco, terracotta, etc.), or foodstuffs (broccoli, pizza, salami, spaghetti, tutti frutti, zucchini...) but sometimes concerning other aspects of Italian life, like — unfortunately — camorra, imbroglio and Mafia.

In other cases the word is calqued, that is adapted in some way — see for example bankrupt(cy) from "bancarotta" or duet from "duetto". Sometimes we have semantic calques or loan translations, when the new word is based not on the form but on the meaning of the original word: examples are superman form German Uebermensch and Italian "grattacielo" from skyscraper.

Most new words, however, are developed from internal sources through the processes of derivation, conversion, compounding, back formation, reduplication, clipping, blending and acronyms. Each of these processes will be described briefly here.

Derivation is the formation of new words by means of affixes, i.e. prefixes or suffixes (there are no infixes in English): a printer is a person or a machine that performs the action expressed by the verb to print. Information and misinform (both from inform) are other examples. More than one affix can be added to one word, as in misinformation, carelessness, unmistakably (five components: un- mis- take -able -ly) and, as we have already seen, antidisestablishmentarianism.

Conversion can be regarded as a special type of derivation, where the ending is Ø ("zero"): a word changes its grammatical class — from noun to verb, from verb to noun, etc. — without changing its form, as in to program from a (computer) program.

Compounding is a very active process. It differs from derivation in that both elements are free forms, that is words that exist in isolation: both key and board are full words, as well as members of keyboard (by contrast, only print is free in printer, while the ending -er is a bound form). Some compounds still reflect the combined meanings of the components (e.g. wavelength) while others require some special knowledge (e.g. motherboard).

Back formations are obtained from words that look like derivatives, by reversing the process of affixation: editor, baby-sitter and television existed before to edit, to baby-sit and to televise were created from them.

Reduplication is obtained through the repetition of a word, often with slight changes: flip-flop, walkie-talkie.

Clippings are abbreviations of longer words: exam and lab (for examination and laboratory) retain the initial part; cello and phone (for violoncello and telephone) retain the final part; flu (for influenza) has lost both the beginning and the end.

Blending combines clipping with compounding, producing words like smog (from smoke and fog), edutainment (from education and entertainment), Europanto (from Europe and Esperanto) or bit (from binary digit).

Acronyms are the words resulting from the initials of a phrase: some of them are pronounced letter by letter (CD for Compact Disk, VIP for Very Important Person) while others are pronounced as words, like Nato, laser or radar — in some cases few people remember what these acronyms stand for.

Some cases are difficult to analyse: is microcomputer a compound or a derived word? Originally, micro- was a prefix, but in the seventies it began to be used in magazines and books as an abbreviation for microprocessor and microcomputer. In webzine the final part of magazine is linked to web to describe one of the journals being "published" on the World Wide Web; however, magazine is not a compound word and the clipped form -zine only exists as a bound element. An older example is permafrost (where perma- is short for permanent); something similar exists in Italian in the first element of "palasport".

Finally, there are words actually invented by someone, for specific purposes; here is the entry for cloze in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition:

In this case, the name of the "inventor" is known, as well as the date and the circumstances that gave origin to the new word: Wilson Taylor devised what he called the cloze procedure as a test of readability of newspaper articles, for a research whose results he published in 1953.

A similar process is very common in advertising and in coining brand names; for example, Pentium™ embodies the Greek root for five with a Latin-looking ending (this microprocessor would have been called a 586 if Intel's™ series from 086 to 486 had been continued); Compaq™ reminds one of compact and, perhaps, quality; and so on. We have similar processes in all languages; one Italian car was advertised as being "scattosa, comodosa, risparmiosa": the first two adjectives did not catch on, because "scattante" and "comoda" already existed, but "risparmiosa" did, because Italian lacked an adjective directly corresponding to cheap. The tradition is an old one: gas was formed in the 17th century by the Belgian chemist and physician van Helmont as a technical term in chemistry, loosely modelled on the Greek chaos (formless void) and Kodak™ was invented at the end of the 19th century by George Eastman. As we saw in the previous section, words like kodak, hoover and xerox have then developed into common nouns and/or verbs, in spite of the justified protests of the owners of the trade-marks.

Internal and external sources are sometimes found at work together: aircraft and aeroplane are, respectively, examples of a native compound and a Greek-Latin loan creation for the same thing.

ESP is based on the standard language not only as a bank of words that can be turned into terms, but also as a bank of processes for the development of vocabulary. This is why a clear understanding of how new words develop in everyday English (EE) is essential for the study of the language used in technical texts.

Words, as we have seen, can acquire new meanings: computer dates back to mid-17th century with the general meaning "one that computes (i.e., makes calculations)." This general meaning is now obsolete, replaced by the current one. Obsolescence, then, is another process at work both in EE and in English for Special Purposes (ESP). Some words or phrases disappear with the objects they refer to (e.g. punch cards in computing), others remain but with a different meaning.

Sometimes it is the form, not the meaning, that changes in order to avoid confusion. For instance, inflammable means "capable of catching fire easily and of burning"; however, the prefix in- may be misunderstood as a negative — a very dangerous possibility that has led to the adoption of flammable (a back-formation) and of non-flammable as its opposite. Inflammable is now becoming obsolete, except perhaps in its metaphorical sense: "easily inflamed, excited, or angered; irascible".

It is important to remember that terms often consist of phrases rather than single words; the combination of adjective and noun is fairly common, as in artificial intelligence, specific weight or central bank. Phrases of this type can be distinguished from normal sequences of adjectives and nouns (as in warm day, pretty girl, etc.) not only because of their special meanings but also because the form is unchangeable: one cannot say *the intelligence is artificial, *the weight is specific or *the bank is central in the same way as one can say the day is warm or the girl is pretty. The same is true in Italian, where "il peso specifico dell'oro è 19,3" is correct but *"lo specifico peso dell'oro è 19,3" is not. Contrast with "il problema specifico dell'immigrazione" and "lo specifico problema dell'immigrazione", both correct.