Word.ws English Dictionary

passive vocabulary

passive vocabulary noun: the words and phrases, collectively, that someone understands in speech and writing but does not commonly use.

Noun

passive vocabulary (countable and uncountable, plural passive vocabularies)

  1. The words and phrases, collectively, that someone understands in speech and writing but does not commonly use.
    • John's passive vocabulary seems to encompass most of the words in the Collegiate Dictionary!

Forms of passive vocabulary

pluralpassive vocabularies

Questions about passive vocabulary

What does passive vocabulary mean?
Passive vocabulary means the words and phrases, collectively, that someone understands in speech and writing but does not commonly use.
What part of speech is passive vocabulary?
Passive vocabulary is a noun.
What is the plural of passive vocabulary?
The plural of passive vocabulary is passive vocabularies.

Words near passive vocabulary in the dictionary

  1. passive vapers
  2. passive vaping
  3. passive vaporing
  4. passive vapouring
  5. passive vocabularies
  6. passive vocabulary
  7. passive voice
  8. passive voices
  9. passive-aggression
  10. passive-aggressive
  11. passive-aggressive personality disorder

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: passive vocabulary (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “passive vocabulary.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/passive_vocabulary. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.