word-hoard

• wordhoard

A modern calque of Old English wordhord (“treasury of words”), equivalent to word +‎ hoard. Compare Dutch woordenschat, German Wortschatz.

word-hoard (plural word-hoards)

1. (literary) A vocabulary; the totality of words of a language or a person.
   • 1930, Janet Rankin Aiken, “English the world over”, in The Bookman, London, page 67:

     Wordiness is not usually considered a virtue any more than impurity is; but words are the wealth of English, and the riches of its word-hoard are only paralleled by the riches of the Anglo-American nations.

   • 1940 January 4, The Cairns Post, Qld, page 3, column 3:

     Emerson came, unlocking his word hoard on nature and friendship and compensation, and irradiating his thoughts'with that peculiar slow smile that was like the emerging of the sun from behind a cloud.

   • 1961, Norma Lorre Goodrich, “Beowulf”, in The Medieval Myths, New York: The New American Library, page 24:

     Beowulf unlocked his word hoard. “We come, indeed, from across the sea.”

   • 1985, Robert Burchfield, The English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 44:

     Primary additions to the wordhoard tend to come from commercial sources[.]

   • 1999, Seamus Heaney, “Introduction”, in Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page xii:

     Still, in spite of the sensation of being caught between a ‘shield-wall’ of opaque references and a ‘word-hoard’ that is old and strange, such readers are also bound to feel a certain ‘shock of the new’.

• vocabulary, lexicon, word-stock