Word.ws English Dictionary

vocd

vocd noun: a measure of the lexical diversity of a given corpus, determined by comparing the sizes of steadily larger random samples from the corpus against their respective type-token ratios.

Noun

vocd (uncountable)

  1. (corpus linguistics) A measure of the lexical diversity of a given corpus, determined by comparing the sizes of steadily larger random samples from the corpus against their respective type-token ratios.
    • The VOCD command was written by Gerard McKee of the Department of Computer Science, The University of Reading. [...] The complete description of VOCD can be found in: Malvern, D., Richards, B., Chipere, N., & Purán, P. (2004).2000–2023, Brian MacWhinney, The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd edition, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, →DOI, archived from the original on 27 Jul 2023, page 110
    • A recently developed index of lexical diversity, vocD, uses repeated calculations of the type–token ratio (TTR) over a range of tokens to show how the TTR varies in relation to sample size. […] Owen and Leonard (2002) found that children with SLI between the ages of 3 and 7 had lower scores on vocD...2008, Eliza Carlson Lee, Leslie Rescorla, “The Use of Psychological State Words By Late Talkers at Ages 3, 4 and 5 Years”, in Applied Psycholinguistics, volume 29, →DOI, page 23

Examples of vocd in a sentence

  • A paired sample t-test was conducted and results indicated no significant differences between vocd scores for younger and older participants, t(29) = 1.154, p = .253.2016, Stephen Kintz, Heather Harris Wright, “Semantic Knowledge Use in Discourse: Influence of Age”, in Discourse Processes, volume 54...
  • To calculate a VOCD, words from a corpus are randomly sampled, in increasing sample sizes.2018, Jessica L. Montag, Michael N. Jones, Linda B. Smith, “Quantity and Diversity: Simulating Early Word Learning Environments”, in...

Forms of vocd

alternative formVOCD
alternative formVocD
alternative formvocD

Origin of vocd

Abbreviation of vocabulary diversity. ‘vocd’ is the name of a computer program originally published in 2004 by Gerard McKee. The program calculates lexical diversity for use in psycholinguistic analysis, and the tool’s name is used somewhat interchangeably to describe the measure it provides.

Questions about vocd

What does vocd mean?
Vocd means a measure of the lexical diversity of a given corpus, determined by comparing the sizes of steadily larger random samples from the corpus against their respective type-token ratios.
How do you use vocd in a sentence?
A paired sample t-test was conducted and results indicated no significant differences between vocd scores for younger and older participants, t(29) = 1.154, p = .253.
What part of speech is vocd?
Vocd is a noun.

Words near vocd in the dictionary

  1. vocative
  2. vocative case
  3. vocative cases
  4. vocatively
  5. vocatives
  6. vocd
  7. Voce
  8. voce di petto
  9. voce di testa
  10. voceri
  11. voceru

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: vocd (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: “vocd.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/vocd. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.