Study Questions and Exercises

1. Word of the Day: Visit the Merriam-Webster World Wide Web site and subscribe to "Word of the Day." Practice analyzing the lexical features of each word. For example, try to determine whether it is a native word, a borrowing, a compound, a blend, or some other type of lexeme. 
2. Using a Dictionary: Look up one of the words in the list below in The Oxford English Dictionary and at least one other hardback dictionary, such as The American Heritage College Dictionary. In addition to summarizing the information you find about the word's pronunciation, part of speech, meaning, and history, comment on any striking morphological, lexical, or semantic phenomena that it demonstrates. Use terms such as "lexical-content word," "free," "bound," "affix," and "derivational" to label each morpheme. Finally, note any important differences between the treatments of the words in the different dictionaries. 
1. gender 
2. jubilee 
3. jumbo 
4. yellow journalism 
5. brunch 
6. macho 
7. chaise longue 
8. snafu 
9. SAT 
10. bus 
11. Broadway 
12. pea 
13. itsy-bitsy 
3. Word History: Use the Oxford English Dictionary to trace the history of one of the words below. Record any variant spellings, the meanings of the word at various periods, and the path by which it entered English. 
1. grammar 
2. enthusiasm 
3. quiescent 
4. higgledy-piggledy 
4. Word Usage: Using your dictionaries, identify the problems in the following sentences: "The fort was succumbed by the army's attack." "Opponents to the law are literally coming out of the woodwork." "Many people are surprised by the enormity of the Oxford English Dictionary." "Despite their tortuous ordeal, survivors of the plane crash were in good spirits." "That lamp is very unique." "Our program offers the most complete news coverage." 
5. Size of the Lexicon: How many words does the English language have? What factors make this question difficult to answer? 
6. Word Coinage: Identify a lexical gap in English and coin a word to fill this gap. You may create a portmanteau, compound, initialism, clipped form, or another type of word. Write a dictionary entry for your word, making sure to include information about its orthography, pronunciation, part of speech, inflections, meanings, and etymology. When writing the meaning, or sense, of the word, try to apply what you have learned about hypernyms. 
7. Investigation of a name: Using one of the resources in the bibliography below or another one you find, identify the origin of a name, such as your first name or surname, the name of a friend or relative, or the name of your hometown. 
8. Musical Linguistics: Look carefully at each of the following country music song titles: "She Took It Like a Man," "No Time to Kill," "I've Got a Good Thing Going," "Friends in Low Places," "Not Too Much to Ask," "I Take My Chances," "Rock Bottom," "Cold Day in Hell," "Long Hard Lesson Learned," "It Wouldn't Kill Me," "Home Ain't Where His Heart Is," "Family Tradition," "No Use Cryin' Over Spilled Perfume." What lexical phenomenon do they all demonstrate? Are some different from others? Explain. 
9. Lexicon and Literary Style: Choose two writers who lived at roughly the same time but who have different styles. For example, you might choose Henry James and Mark Twain. Select 20 lexical-content words at random from a book by each writer and look them up in a dictionary. What percentage of each writer's lexicon is native vocabulary, and what percentage comes from loanwords? Speculate on how the choice of native or borrowed vocabulary affects a writer's style. 

Bibliography

• Crystal, David. "English Vocabulary." The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 116-187. 
• The Oxford English Dictionary. 
• The American Heritage College Dictionary. 
• Webster's Third International Dictionary.

People

• Lewis Carroll 
• Samuel Johnson 
• Noah Webster 

Terms

• lexicon 
• lexeme 
• abbreviation 
• initialism 
• acronym 
• clipping 
• blend 
• borrowing (loanword) 
• affix 
• prefix 
• suffix 
• conversion (functional shift) 
• compound 
• back formation 
• reduplicative 
• lexical gap 
• coinage 
• nonce word 
• neologism 
• generalization 
• specialization 
• amelioration 
• pejoration 
• folk etymology 
• onomastics 
• ejaculation 
• onomatopoeia 
• eponym 
• commonization 
• analogic change 
• synonym 
• antonym 
• hypernym 
• hiponym 
• morphology 
• homophone 
• collocation 
• idiom 
• lexical phrase 
• denotation 
• connotation 
• catch phrase