Lexicography is the academic discipline of compiling, writing, or editing dictionaries. It is divided into practical and theoretical lexicography, with the latter focusing on the structural and semantic relationships between words. Lexemes, or word roots, make up a lexicon, which is the set of meanings of words in a language. A lexicographer deals with the meaning, structure, evolution, and relationships between words to create a dictionary.
Perhaps the simplest explanation for lexicography is that it is an academic discipline that involves compiling, writing, or editing dictionaries. Lexicography is widely regarded as an independent scientific discipline, although it is a subfield within linguistics.
Many consider lexicography to be divided into two related areas. The act of writing or editing dictionaries is known as Practical Lexicography. The analysis or description of the vocabulary of a particular language and the meaning that relates certain words to others in a dictionary, is known as theoretical lexicography. Theoretical lexicography is concerned in particular with developing theories on the structural and semantic relationships between dictionary words. Because it involves the theoretical analysis of lexicon, theoretical lexicography is also known as metalexicography.
To better understand lexicography, it can be helpful to know what a lexicon is. Lexicon is a term used in linguistics to indicate the archive of lexemes. Lexemes are abstract, minimal units in a language that link related forms of a word together. For example, the words fly, fly, fly, fly, and so on, are all morphological variations of the lexeme fly. Fly is the lexeme because it is the basis from which these word variations are derived.
Lexemes, therefore, constitute a lexicon which is the set of meanings of words in a given language. In a dictionary, lexemes, sometimes generically referred to as word roots, are given first and followed by variations of the base word. As we can see when reading a dictionary, lexicon also deals with the area of linguistics known as semantics. Semantics refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language and, of course, in the vocabulary elements of which a language is composed.
In addition to providing data on the morphology and semantics of a lexeme, the dictionary also provides structural information on the root of the word and historical information on the evolution of the word in its modern form. This is known as etymology.
A lexicographer deals with what words are, what they mean, how the vocabulary of a language is structured, how speakers of the language use and understand words, how words evolved, and what relationships exist between words. This is the information that a lexicographer compiles when creating a dictionary.
Thus, a lexicographer is a linguist whose specific expertise is in writing dictionaries. Lexicography, with all its related concepts and its links to other areas of linguistics, is the specific area of academic work dedicated to these concepts.
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