Vocabulary · World English

The rules

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Vocabulary — The Core Lexicon

The word list S2 quietly depends on. S2’s three vocabulary layers — plain verb over opaque phrasal, clearest sense over heavy polysemy, and regular pairing over arbitrary collocation — each quote a per-word list to do their job. Without it those layers are promissory notes — statable in prose, but not verifiable or reversible.

Source of truth

The data lives in ../tools/data/lexicon.json, not here. This file is its schema documentation, a set of representative highlights, and a coverage statement — kept honest by tools/test/vocabulary.test.ts, which parses the highlight tables below and the coverage counts and asserts both against lexicon.json itself. If this file and the data disagree, the data wins and the test fails.

../tools/src/core-lexicon.ts loads lexicon.json and builds everything the tooling consumes from it:

  • toAbolishedEntries() feeds the linter/translator dataset (dataset.ts) — phrasal-verb forms the same way every other abolished form is tracked.
  • buildPhraseTransforms() feeds the forward translator (translate.ts): every inflected surface form of a phrasal verb, matched longest-first.

(G3 no longer drops verb prepositions — a verb keeps its standard preposition as vocabulary — so droppedPreps is empty and there is no dropped-prep transform or preposition-restoration pass.)

Schema

Six arrays. phrasalVerbs is machine-actionable (the translators read it); droppedPreps is retired — empty, because G3 no longer drops verb prepositions (a verb keeps its standard preposition as vocabulary); sensePreferences, collocations, falseFriends, and registerDefaults are doc-only — recorded for the human record, never applied or even flagged by tooling, because applying them needs word-sense disambiguation or judgment the tools don’t have.

ArrayRuleActionable?Fields
droppedPreps— (retired)no (empty)
phrasalVerbsS2yesphrasal, plain, alternates?, separable?, rank?, note?, confidence?
sensePreferencesS2nostandard, sense, ruling, woe, rank?, note?
collocationsS2nostandard, woe, ruling, alternates?, rank?, note?
falseFriends— (advanced hazard)nol1, looksLike, actualMeaning, note?
registerDefaults— (advanced hazard)noconcept, variants, default, rank?, note?

droppedPreps is retired. Earlier drafts dropped a verb’s meaning-neutral preposition and carried a per-verb ruling here; G3 no longer drops, so the array is empty. The two verbs that used to route a meaning-changing particle to a plain verb (believe in → trust, approve of → like) survive as ordinary phrasalVerbs entries.

phrasalVerbs.plain is the one single-word machine replacement; alternates are additional human-readable options folded into the linter’s report text (woe = [plain, ...alternates].join(" / ")) but never produced by the translator. separable is recorded (give it up) but v1 of the translator only matches contiguous phrasal spans — a separated phrasal is left alone and flagged by the scanner as ordinary prose, since it isn’t a bigram the linter tracks.

Coverage

Frequency spine: ../tools/data/ngsl.json — NGSL 1.2 (Browne, Culligan & Phillips, 2013; CC BY 4.0), 2,809 ranked headwords. The sweep walks it rank 1→2,809 in six ~500-word bands; a word earns a row only when at least one array has something non-default to say about it (a fully regular word like table needs none).

Bands swept: 6 of 6 — the full NGSL 1.2 spine (ranks 1–2,809). Row counts (test-checked against lexicon.json by vocabulary.test.ts):

ArrayRows
droppedPreps0
phrasalVerbs56
sensePreferences44
collocations52
falseFriends2
registerDefaults27

This is a first full pass, not an exhaustive one: only words with a clear, low-collision-risk case earned a row (see tools/README.md’s “Sweep methodology” for the criteria and the cases deliberately left out). Growth continues opportunistically as new collisions or gaps surface.

Table A — G3 canonical prepositions (retired)

Retired. G3 no longer drops a verb’s preposition — a verb keeps its standard preposition as ordinary vocabulary (listen to, wait for, depend on) — so there is nothing to tabulate and droppedPreps is empty. The two verbs that used to route a meaning-changing particle to a plain verb, believe in → trust and approve of → like, live in Table B as ordinary phrasal verbs.

Table B — S2 phrasal → plain (phrasalVerbs)

Non-compositional phrasal verbs and their plain replacement. Transparent phrasals (sit down, stand up) are not listed — S2 leaves them alone; only the opaque ones are replaced.

Phrasal verbWorld English
give upquit / stop
put offdelay
look aftermind / tend
come up withinvent / devise
find outlearn / discover
look forseek
believe intrust

look for and believe in are ordinary phrasalVerbs entries, not G3 vocabulary: dropping their preposition would collide two distinct senses (look vs. look for, believe vs. believe in), so each is instead replaced by a single plain verb.

Table C — S2 preferred sense (sensePreferences, doc-only)

Where a common word has a rare or risky sense, use the plain word instead. run, get, and take are reserved for their most concrete meaning.

Standard phraseRisky senseWorld English
run a businessrun = managemanage a business
run a programrun = startstart a program
run (on foot)concrete, physicalrun (kept)
get a letterget = receivereceive a letter
get tiredget = becomebecome tired
take a phototake = makemake a photo
take a bustake = useuse a bus

Table D — S2 collocation → regular pairing (collocations, doc-only)

Where standard English forces an arbitrary word-partnership, a regular literal pairing is allowed. Includes the adjective- and noun-selected prepositions World English keeps standard (good at math, afraid of dogs, reason for it) — the same “verbs keep their preposition as vocabulary” principle as G3, applied to adjectives and nouns.

Standard collocationWorld English
heavy rainstrong rain
make a decisiondecide
do homeworkdo homework / study
make the bedmake the bed (kept)
make friendsmake friends (kept)
good at mathgood at math (adjective-selected prep — kept)
afraid of dogsafraid of dogs (adjective-selected prep — kept)
reason for itreason for it (noun-selected prep — kept)

Table E — False friends (falseFriends, doc-only)

Words that resemble an L1 word but mean something else — a source of confident error (PAIN-POINTS §4). L1-specific, grows per language pair; shown here in full (small enough not to need sampling).

L1Looks likeActually meansNote
Spanishembarazada → “embarrassed”pregnantnot embarrassed
Spanishactually ← “actualmente”in fact / reallyactualmente = “currently”, a partial false friend

Table F — Near-synonym register (registerDefaults, doc-only, highlights)

Germanic vs. Latinate layers give English two or three words for one concept, differing only in register. World English picks the register-neutral default and drops the rest for everyday use.

ConceptStandard variantsWorld English default
request informationask / inquire / interrogateask
of a monarchkingly / royal / regalroyal
begin doing somethingstart / begin / commencestart
buy somethingbuy / purchase / acquirebuy
help someonehelp / assist / aidhelp
use somethinguse / utilizeuse

Acceptance criteria

An entry is “done” only when:

  1. It is consistent with lexicon.jsontools/test/vocabulary.test.ts parses every table above and every coverage count and asserts both against the data.
  2. It satisfies the structural invariants tools/test/core-lexicon.test.ts checks: droppedPreps is empty (retired), and phrasalVerbs.plain is a single word.
  3. It stays consistent with samples — e.g. the S2 phrasal replacements agree with the dogfooded passages.
  4. The forward/reverse round-trip property holds for the S2 phrasal verbs: the forward translator replaces the phrasal with its plain verb, and the plain verb — itself valid standard English — needs no reverse step (tools/test/reverse.test.ts).

These tables are highlights; lexicon.json is authoritative for anything not shown here.