Lexical set
Group of words that fall under a single category
A lexical set is a group of words that share a particular vowel or consonant sound.
A phoneme is a basic unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. Most commonly, following the work of phonetician John C. Wells, a lexical set is a class of words in a language that share a certain vowel phoneme. As Wells himself says, lexical sets "enable one to refer concisely to large groups of words which tend to share the same vowel, and to the vowel which they share". For instance, the pronunciation of the vowel in cup, luck, sun, blood, glove, and tough may vary in different English dialects but is usually consistent within each dialect and so the category of words forms a lexical set, which Wells, for ease, calls the STRUT set. Meanwhile, words like bid, cliff, limb, miss, etc. form a separate lexical set: Wells's KIT set. Originally, Wells developed 24 such labels—keywords—for the vowel lexical sets of English, which have been sometimes modified and expanded by himself or other scholars for various reasons. Lexical sets have also been used to describe the vowels of other languages, such as French, Irish and Scots.
There are several reasons why lexical sets are useful.
The public source identifies “Lexical set” as group of words that fall under a single category. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lexical, Group and words.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6537702. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lexical set” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.