meaning - Difference between lexicon, vocabulary and dictionary


What exactly is the difference? Around the Web, I'm finding contradictory information and sometimes circular references.


Some say the lexicon is inherent to a language (objective) while a vocabulary is only relative to a (group of) person(s) (subjective). Wikipedia says the lexicon is the vocabulary of a language.


Dictionary should be an easy one, it's a mapping, either between languages or between words and word sense definitions. But some definitions of vocabulary seem to be equivalent to the latter.


Are there any clear formal definitions?




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