lexical set

A lexical set is a group of words that share a similar feature.

Some words of the English language do not belong to any lexical set.

By contrast, lexical sets are open systems, since new words come into a language all the time.

The following are the typical spellings of words in the lexical set.

For such accents, the 24 Wells lexical sets may be inadequate.

Lexical sets may also be used to describe splits and mergers.

The vowels below are named by the lexical set they belong to:

Each lexical set is named after a representative keyword, as follows:

Learning vocabulary in lexical sets: dangers and guidelines.

Some varieties of English make distinctions in stressed vowels that are not captured by the 24 lexical sets.

The table "Dialects and open vowels" shows this variation with lexical sets in which these sounds occur.

Typically, the taboo lexical set has a one-to-many correspondence with the everyday set.

The following spellings are frequent in words, but more commonly spell words in other lexical sets.

Although not included in the standard 24 lexical sets, these "have indexical and diagnostic value in distinguishing accents".

Some lexical sets are also included, such as homographs and homonyms, compound nouns, and academic subjects.

Words such as 'book' and 'cook' can be pronounced with the same tenser vowel as in Lexical set, not the one of .

Lexical sets have also been used to describe the pronunciation of other languages, such as French, Irish and Scots.

The lexical set is merged with other lexical sets in the following accents:

The name "foot-strut split" refers to the lexical sets introduced by Wells (1982), and identifies the vowel phonemes in the words.

In Accents of English he defined the concept of lexical sets, a concept in wide usage.

In RP and conservative North American speech, the lexical set is realized as [ɪ].

Wells himself uses the Lexical Sets most prominently to give "tables of lexical incidence" for all the various accents he discusses in his work.

Many words in the lexical set (most of those spelled ir) were pronounced /ir/ in Middle English, before the fern-fir-fur merger.

Wells defined each lexical set on the basis of the pronunciation of words in two reference accents, which he calls RP and GenAm.

This table shows the distribution of the vowels in accordance with the Standard Lexical Sets of John C. Wells: