Lexicology and Lexicography

Abstract

Lexicology is the scientific investigation of the lexicon of a language, including, for example, its historical development, its social stratification, its quantitative composition, or the way in which some thematic area is encoded. Lexicography, the oldest subdiscipline of linguistics, deals with the compilation of dictionaries. There are many types of dictionaries, depending mainly on which lexical units are included, and which of their properties—such as sound, spelling, grammatical features, meaning, etymology, and others—are described. Two technological innovations are crucial to the presentation of lexical information—the art of printing, which led to the familiar printed dictionary, and the computer, which makes it possible to develop complex lexical retrieval systems.