ABSTRACT
One of the first questions which needs to be asked in considering ways and means of organizing vocabulary for teaching and in attempting an understanding of how vocabulary is learnt is: are the vocabularies of languages structured or organized internally or are they random, unordered lists of words? The answer to this question is not at all clear-cut and straightforward; there seem to be some principles of organization that can be applied to some areas of the vocabulary of a language like English, but it is by no means certain that these principles can be extended to the whole of the vast word store. To begin with, though, not least of the problems is the very notion of words.
