Yeah, but it isn’t impressive avoiding a letter if you can use any word you want, and it doesnt matter what it means. “Without employing the second most frequent letter of English.” would make sense or “the vowel which is commonly listed first” or some sort of thing. I suspect they just didn’t know what lexicon meant and thought it sounded smart.
Ahh, I didn’t know that Americans* called dictionaries ‘lexicons’. In most forms of English I’ve heard, and in the field of linguistics, ‘lexicon’ is the complete set of vocabulary in a language, or subject. A dictionary is an alphabetical list of a lexicon, often with definitions.
*I’m presuming it’s Americans because mirriam webster lists the dictionary definition first, while OED and Cambridge only list that as archaic usage.
In what sense is it the first letter of the English lexicon? Lexicon ≠ alphabet
In the sense that Alphabet has an ‘a’ in it.
Yeah, but it isn’t impressive avoiding a letter if you can use any word you want, and it doesnt matter what it means. “Without employing the second most frequent letter of English.” would make sense or “the vowel which is commonly listed first” or some sort of thing. I suspect they just didn’t know what lexicon meant and thought it sounded smart.
I think the description “first letter” is easily understood if you remember what a lexicon used to look like.
Ahh, I didn’t know that Americans* called dictionaries ‘lexicons’. In most forms of English I’ve heard, and in the field of linguistics, ‘lexicon’ is the complete set of vocabulary in a language, or subject. A dictionary is an alphabetical list of a lexicon, often with definitions.
*I’m presuming it’s Americans because mirriam webster lists the dictionary definition first, while OED and Cambridge only list that as archaic usage.
Well I’m neither English or American, but to me the word lexicon means encyclopedia. It’s still alphabetical.