8. Lexicon and register

Where the words of Modern Hebrew come from and how they are used: the vocabulary problem of the revival and how Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the Language Committee and the Academy of the Hebrew Language met it; the ways new words are made (old words with new senses, root-and-pattern coinage, blends, acronyms, suffixes, calques); loanwords by source language, each etymology checked; slang and army slang; and the levels of register, from high literary style to street speech, with the gap between the Academy's norms and what people say. Discourse markers, greetings and swear words are treated as speech acts in 09; this chapter is about the words themselves.

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Etymologies in this chapter were checked on 2026-10-17 against the English Wiktionary extract by kaikki.org (local kaikki.org-dictionary-Hebrew.jsonl, CC BY-SA; consulted, not copied). Where Wiktionary gives no etymology or hedges, the table says so. Transliteration and examples follow 02.

Contents

• 8.1 The vocabulary problem of the revival
• 8.2 Ben-Yehuda's method, in his own account
• 8.3 The Language Committee and the Academy
• 8.4 How new words are made
• 8.5 Coinages that won and coinages that lost
• 8.6 The inherited layers: Biblical, Mishnaic, Aramaic, Medieval
• 8.7 Loanwords by source
• 8.8 Loan verbs and loan morphology
• 8.9 Calques and loan meanings
• 8.10 Slang
• 8.11 Register
• 8.12 Norm and use
• 8.13 Lexical resources
• References

8.1 The vocabulary problem of the revival

Hebrew in the 1880s had an enormous written vocabulary — Bible, Mishna, Talmud (with its Aramaic), midrash, liturgical poetry, medieval philosophy and science, Haskala prose — but large gaps exactly where a spoken language needs words: household objects, food, clothing, tools, plants and animals identified with precision, emotions and casual talk, and the whole of modern technology and administration. Yannai (1982, writing for the Academy) puts it vividly: in the old language no one could buy a railway ticket, tell a plumber where the faucet was, or ask to sharpen a pencil (local: lingbulk-1982-yannai-innovation-neologism-modern-hebrew). Ben-Yehuda describes the same embarrassment from his first attempts at conversation in Hebrew: talk on elevated topics went well enough, but as soon as it turned to simple, everyday things the speakers "were mute" (introduction to his dictionary, § א; paraphrase).

Three sources filled the gap (Yannai 1982; Fellman 1973, not held):

1. Old words, searched for in every layer of the literature and given new or narrower senses.
2. Coinage from Hebrew (and Aramaic) roots in Hebrew patterns.
3. Borrowing — reluctantly at first, massively later in the spoken language.

8.2 Ben-Yehuda's method, in his own account

Ben-Yehuda's long introduction to his Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew (the Mavo ha-Gadol, written for the dictionary that began to appear in 1908) is public domain and held locally (Project Ben-Yehuda, m7327.txt). Its main points, paraphrased:

• The idea. In 1878, a student in Russia during the Russo-Turkish war, he was struck by the idea of a national revival of Israel in its land. Soon he concluded that a people needs not only its land but its language — and that, while the return to the land depended on others, the return to the language was in the Jews' own hands. Hebrew had to be spoken not only in holy or learned matters but "by young and old, women and children", in every matter of life.
• The doubt. Two questions followed: could a people return to a language it had stopped speaking for centuries, and could the language serve every need of life? His first conversations in Hebrew — in Paris and on the way to the Land of Israel — showed him the gaps in everyday vocabulary.
• The dictionary. He first collected words in notebooks by subject (all stones, all trees, all tools) because an alphabetical dictionary helps someone who knows a word, not someone looking for one. The final work is alphabetical but groups related words under their heads.
• Precise meanings. Because the purpose was speech, a definition like "a kind of stone" or "a kind of tree" was useless: he tried to establish which stone (e.g. אחלמה) and which tree (תדהר) an old word named, so that a speaker could use it of a real object.
• Arabic as a sister language. He compared Hebrew roots systematically with Arabic, for two reasons: living Arabic could settle doubts about the meaning of roots in a language no longer spoken, and where Hebrew lacked a root for a needed word, he held that it was legitimate to take the root from Arabic, "its sister", since such a root had probably existed in Hebrew and been lost. He preferred this to borrowing from European ("Aryan") languages, whose words, he argued, fit the Hebrew patterns only by accident.
• Medieval Hebrew. He mined the translators and philosophers of the Middle Ages — the Ibn Tibbon family and their circle — whose words such as אופק "horizon", מרכז "centre", קוטב "pole" had become common property, and pointed to many more forgotten in little-read books.
• His own coinages. He included in the dictionary the new words he had made himself for daily life, trade, the household, relations between people and abstract modern ideas, marking them as his.
• Patterning on Arabic. When building a noun from an existing root he looked at how Arabic built the corresponding concept: Hebrew, like Arabic, names the tailor after the thread (חייט khayat, Arabic khayyāṭ), not after cutting cloth as French tailleur and German Schneider do.

Words credited to Ben-Yehuda by Wiktionary (checked): מילון milon "dictionary" (1880, from mila "word" + -on), עיתון iton "newspaper" (et "time" + -on, after German Zeitung), רכבת rakévet "train" (root r-k-b "ride"), גלידה glida "ice cream" (Aramaic glida "ice, frost", matched to Italian gelato), אופניים ofanáyim "bicycle" (1903, dual of poetic ofan "wheel"), מברשת mivréshet "brush" (on the model of brosse/Bürste/brush), מברק mivrak "telegram" (after Arabic barqiyya, from barak "lightning"), חיידק khaydak "bacterium" (khay "alive" + dak "tiny").

8.3 The Language Committee and the Academy

Va'ad ha-Lashon ha-Ivrit "the Hebrew Language Committee" was set up in Jerusalem in 1890 by Ben-Yehuda and scholars of grammar, medieval literature, Bible and Talmud — volunteers meeting weekly in a private home and answering questions of usage (Yannai 1982). Yannai argues that the real engine was the teachers, organised from 1904: teaching arithmetic, geography and biology in Hebrew, each teacher had invented his own terms, so a pupil moving from Judea to Galilee met a different word for "multiplication". The teachers asked the Committee for standard terminologies for school subjects, crafts and sciences. The Committee's stated aims were to make Hebrew fit for every sphere of life and to preserve its "Oriental" character — its own patterns of word formation and style (Yannai 1982).

The Academy of the Hebrew Language (ha-Akademya la-Lashon ha-Ivrit) replaced the Committee by a law of 1953, with the duty "to guide the development of the Hebrew language on the basis of research into its periods and branches" (Yannai 1982, quoting the law). It works through professional committees per field, a terminology committee and a grammar committee, and a plenary that approves or rejects. Approved terms are published in the Official Gazette and are binding on state bodies — the school system, public broadcasting, the army, municipalities — while for the press and the public they are recommendations (Yannai 1982). By 1982 the Committee and the Academy had codified about sixty thousand terms (ibid.); the Academy publishes them in a searchable online terms database (terms.hebrew-academy.org.il, not checked; the main site returned HTTP 403 to our fetch on 2026-10-17).

The Academy also rules on spelling (the rules for unpointed full spelling, revised 2017; 02), transliteration (2006), punctuation, and grammar questions. It does not police speech, and many of its decisions record usage rather than impose it.

8.4 How new words are made

8.4.1 Old words, new senses

The cheapest coinage is an old word with a new meaning, the old referent being obsolete (Yannai compares English hose, which meant something else in Shakespeare's day):

8.4.2 Root and pattern

The productive heart of Hebrew word formation: put a root into a pattern (mishkal for nouns, binyan for verbs) and the pattern supplies a category of meaning (04, 05). Ornan (2014) describes the lexicon as a grid of roots × patterns in which many cells are empty and can be filled when a need arises: several thousand roots, 100–120 noun patterns, and only seven verb patterns (local: aclbulk-2014-ornan-innovation-verbs-hebrew).

Verbs are formed the same way, by putting a root — old, new or foreign — into a binyan, most often pi'el or hitpa'el (05, § 8.8).

8.4.3 Blends (hal'ama)

8.4.4 Acronyms and abbreviations

Acronyms are written with gershayim before the last letter (02) and often read as words:

Acronyms can become roots: from dú'akh comes the verb le-davéakh "to report" (pi'el, root d-w-ḥ), used in speech and in law.

8.4.5 Suffixes from Europe

Yiddish and Slavic suffixes are productive in the colloquial language: -nik (קיבוצניק kibútsnik "kibbutz member", נודניק núdnik "pest" — itself from Yiddish), -chik / -tchik (diminutive: bakbukchik), -le (diminutive and endearment on names: Rina'le), -izm, -ist, -izatsya (internationalisms: סוציאליזם, normalizatsya). The suffix -iya in טלוויזיה televízya "television" reflects a Slavic-type ending (Polish telewizja; Wiktionary).

8.5 Coinages that won and coinages that lost

The Academy's decisions are recommendations for the public (§ 8.3), and many coinages failed. Examples (common knowledge in the literature; Yannai 1982 notes that each term's fate is decided by usage):

(The sakh-rakhok story is widely repeated; we have not found a primary source and keep it as anecdote.)

8.6 The inherited layers: Biblical, Mishnaic, Aramaic, Medieval

Most of the core vocabulary is inherited from the classical layers (10): the body, kinship, nature, basic verbs. Where Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew differ, Modern Hebrew often took the Mishnaic word for the everyday sense:

Aramaic contributed, through the Talmud and the liturgy, a layer that is everywhere in Modern Hebrew: אבא ába "dad" and אמא íma "mum" (Aramaic ʾabbā, ʾimmā; Wiktionary), סבתא sávta "grandma" (Aramaic), אגב agav "by the way" (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, from ʿal gav "on the back of"), דווקא dávka "precisely, of all things" (Aramaic dawqā "exactness"), ברז bérez "tap" (Jewish Palestinian Aramaic birzā "bunghole"), מדע mada "science" (Aramaic manda' "knowledge"), and many words of learned discourse (kelomar "that is", afílu "even", bediyuk "exactly" — the last is Hebrew b- + diyuk).

Medieval Hebrew, especially the translators of philosophy and science from Arabic, gave the abstract vocabulary: אופק ófek "horizon", מרכז merkaz "centre", קוטב kotev "pole", מציאות metsi'ut "reality", איכות eykhut "quality", כמות kamut "quantity" — the last two calqued on Arabic kayfiyya and kammiyya (Ben-Yehuda's introduction points to the Ibn Tibbons for the first three).

8.7 Loanwords by source

Ben-Yehuda wanted Arabic roots and few European words; the spoken language did the opposite in the long run: European internationalisms are everywhere, and Arabic entered not through the Academy but through the street and the army. Yannai (1982), writing for the Academy, says that only "several dozen" Arabic words had been taken over, for lack of cultural contact — an assessment of standard vocabulary; slang is another matter (§ 8.10).

Yiddish

Arabic

Henkin (2020, not held) and Rosenthal's dictionaries (§ 8.10) are the main references on Arabic in Hebrew slang.

Russian and other Slavic

Russian words also entered with the 1990s immigration (in immigrant speech and slang), and Russian-speaking Israelis use a Hebrew-Russian mixed register (Naiditch 2000 — not held).

English

English has been the main source of new loans since the 1960s: ok, bay, sóri, tánks, láyk, post, imeyl, kompyúter (rare beside makhshev), sténdert "standard" (Wiktionary), traktor "tractor", kétchap, ínternet, súper as an adjective and intensifier "super, great" (Wiktionary: from English; homonymous with sofer "writer" in spelling סופר). Many English loans take Hebrew morphology; English-based verbs are listed in § 8.8.

Ladino, Greek, Romance, others

Internationalisms

Words of Greek and Latin origin common to European languages enter with a Hebrew ending -ya / -a: politika, fízika, biológya, demokrátya, televízya, télefon. Their stress follows the European source, not the Hebrew final-stress rule (03).

8.8 Loan verbs and loan morphology

A foreign noun or adjective can be borrowed as it is; a foreign verb cannot, because every Hebrew verb must be in a binyan (Ornan 2014). Speakers extract a consonantal root from the foreign word and put it into pi'el (active) or hitpa'el (middle, reflexive) — the two binyanim that accept roots of four and more consonants (05):

Ornan (2014) also describes the other route: a light verb with a noun, as in English make an effort: la'asot ma'amats "make an effort", le-harim télefon "pick up a phone" (= to phone), lishlóakh mivrak "send a telegram", la'arokh bikur "pay a visit". Liebeskind and HaCohen-Kerner (2016) built a lexicon of such verb–noun expressions (local: lingbulk-2016-liebeskind-lexical-resource-hebrew-verb-noun).

Loan nouns take Hebrew plurals: faksim, postim, djobim; feminine-looking ones take -ot: pítsa → pítsot, banána → bananot. Loan adjectives take Hebrew gender and number: nórmali / nórmalit / nórmaliyim; kul "cool" is usually invariable.

8.9 Calques and loan meanings

Many Hebrew idioms are translations of European ones, a point stressed by the hybrid view (01):

(The table keeps only calques whose model is clear; ma nishma after Yiddish vos hert zikh is the standard example in the literature, e.g. Zuckermann 2003, not held.)

8.10 Slang

Hebrew slang (sleng, also ivrit meduberet "spoken Hebrew") is rich and fast-changing. Its main sources:

• Arabic (§ 8.7): the largest source of slang words and interjections, taken from contact with Palestinian Arabic and from Jews of Arab lands.
• Yiddish (§ 8.7): the older layer, now partly dated.
• English: the youngest layer, through media and technology.
• Army slang: universal service makes the army a slang factory, and army words spread to civilian speech: ג׳ובניק djóbnik (desk-job soldier), shin-gímel (guard post), rasar (company sergeant major, acronym of rav-samal rishon), kravi (combat soldier, from krav "battle"), pazam (seniority; usually expanded as perek zman minimali "minimal period of time" — expansions vary in the sources), gibush "selection camp" (lit. "crystallisation"), shmira "guard duty". Army acronyms are countless; we list only those whose meaning we could check.
• Internal processes: the diminutive -ush and -le on names and nouns; reduplication (maher-maher "very quickly"); semantic shifts of native words: totakh "cannon" → "awesome person"; magniv "cool, amazing" — formally the hif'il participle of g-n-v "steal", and Wiktionary notes possible influence of English magnificent or French magnifique; khaval al ha-zman "a pity about the time" → "amazing" or "awful"; éser "ten (out of ten)" → "perfect".

Ruvik Rosenthal's Dictionary of Israeli Slang (Milon ha-Sleng ha-Makif, 2005) is the standard reference (not held); Dahn Ben-Amotz and Netiva Ben-Yehuda's World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang (1972, 1982; not held) documented the Palmach generation.

Slang greetings, interjections and discourse markers are described as speech acts in 09 (§§ 9.6, 9.10, 9.11); swearing in 09 § 9.12.

8.11 Register

Hebrew speakers and grammarians distinguish several levels (Glinert 1989; Coffin and Bolozky 2005 — not held):

The same idea at different levels:

The Knesset Corpus shows register change over time: Goldin et al. (2024) find a reduction in lexical richness in parliamentary speech from 1998 to 2022 (local: arxivrecent-2024-goldin-knesset-corpus-annotated-corpus-hebrew). Zeldes et al. (2022) list the word forms that most separate the 1990–91 Ha'aretz treebank from Wikipedia: period words (Kuwait, Soviet, dollar), genre words ("day before yesterday", "week", "but" — narrative and argument), and spelling (the colloquial הייתה "was" for Ha'aretz's היתה) (11).

8.12 Norm and use

The Academy and the school grammar (ha-lashon ha-tiknit "the correct language") keep classical norms that speakers do not follow. Some well-known points (Glinert 1989; Ravid 1995 — not held; details in 04, 05, 07):

8.13 Lexical resources

Held locally or open (details and licences in Sources and 12):

• Ben-Yehuda's dictionary: only the introduction is held (public domain, Project Ben-Yehuda).
• Hspell 1.4 (AGPL): word list and morphological analyser of modern Hebrew spelling, hspell.
• MILA lexicon (Itai, Wintner and Yona 2006): a computational lexicon of contemporary Hebrew (paper local: lingbulk-2006-itai-computational-lexicon-contemporary-hebrew; the lexicon itself not held).
• Dicta wordlist (CC BY-NC, tests only) with lemma, root, POS and features, wordlist.
• UniMorph Hebrew (CC BY-SA), inflection tables from Wiktionary, unimorph-heb.
• Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA), glosses, etymologies, inflections.
• Klein's etymological dictionary (1987; Sefaria text CC BY-NC, held under nc/; print edition © Carta): etymologies of Modern Hebrew words.
• Academy terms database (online; not harvested).
• Even-Shoshan's dictionary, the standard Modern Hebrew dictionary (not held, copyrighted).

References

Works marked not held are not in the local library; see «wanted» in Sources.

• Ben-Amotz, Dahn and Netiva Ben-Yehuda. 1972/1982. Milon olami le-ivrit meduberet (World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang). Not held.
• Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer. Introduction (ha-Mavo ha-Gadol) to Milon ha-Lashon ha-Ivrit ha-Yeshana ve-ha-Khadasha (Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew), 1908–1959. Public domain; Project Ben-Yehuda benyehuda.org — local: m7327.txt.
• Coffin, Edna Amir and Shmuel Bolozky. 2005. A Reference Grammar of Modern Hebrew. CUP. Not held.
• Fellman, Jack. 1973. The Revival of a Classical Tongue. The Hague: Mouton. Not held.
• Glinert, Lewis. 1989. The Grammar of Modern Hebrew. CUP. Not held.
• Goldin, Gili, Nick Howell, Noam Ordan, Ella Rabinovich and Shuly Wintner. 2024. The Knesset Corpus. arXiv:2405.18115. Local: arxivrecent-2024-goldin-knesset-corpus-annotated-corpus-hebrew.
• Henkin, Roni. 2020. Arabic loanwords in Hebrew slang (various articles; e.g. in Journal of Jewish Languages). Not held.
• Itai, Alon, Shuly Wintner and Shlomo Yona. 2006. A Computational Lexicon of Contemporary Hebrew. LREC 2006. Local: lingbulk-2006-itai-computational-lexicon-contemporary-hebrew.
• kaikki.org. English Wiktionary extract, Hebrew. CC BY-SA. kaikki.org/dictionary/Hebrew — local: kaikki-enwiktionary-hebrew-aramaic (checked 2026-10-17).
• Klein, Ernest. 1987. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English. Jerusalem: Carta. Sefaria text CC BY-NC, local Klein_Dictionary.jsonl (tests and reference only).
• Liebeskind, Chaya and Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner. 2016. A Lexical Resource of Hebrew Verb-Noun Multi-Word Expressions. LREC 2016. Local: lingbulk-2016-liebeskind-lexical-resource-hebrew-verb-noun.
• Naiditch, Larissa. 2000. Hebrew in the speech of Russian immigrants (on Russian–Hebrew mixing). Not held.
• Ornan, Uzzi. 2014. Innovation of Verbs in Hebrew. Local: aclbulk-2014-ornan-innovation-verbs-hebrew.
• Ravid, Dorit. 1995. Language Change in Child and Adult Hebrew. OUP. Not held.
• Rosenthal, Ruvik. 2005. Milon ha-sleng ha-makif (The Comprehensive Slang Dictionary). Jerusalem: Keter. Not held.
• Yannai, Yig'al. 1983. Innovation and Neologism in Modern Hebrew. In B. Snell (ed.), Term Banks for Tomorrow's World: Translating and the Computer 4 (conference of November 1982). London: Aslib. Local: lingbulk-1982-yannai-innovation-neologism-modern-hebrew. (Cited as Yannai 1982 in the text, after the conference year.)
• Zeldes, Amir, Nick Howell, Noam Ordan and Yifat Ben Moshe. 2022. A Second Wave of UD Hebrew Treebanking and Cross-Domain Parsing. EMNLP 2022. aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.292 our card
• Zuckermann, Ghil'ad. 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Palgrave Macmillan. Not held.
• Academy of the Hebrew Language. hebrew-academy.org.il (returned HTTP 403 on 2026-10-17) and the terms database terms.hebrew-academy.org.il (not checked).

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