Category:Swadesh Lists

A Swadesh list is one of several lists of vocabulary with basic meanings, developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1940–50s, which is used in lexicostatistics (quantitative language relatedness assessment) and glottochronology (language divergence dating).

There are two basic versions of Swadesh list, one with 200 meanings, the other with 100 meanings. In the composite listing, there are actually 207 meanings in total, since seven of the entries in the 100-meaning list (breast, fingernail, full, horn, knee, moon, round) were not in the original 200-meaning list. To see which words are in which lists, see Wiktionary's Swadesh list appendix.