- The collection targets of SGOL are terms that I hear at conferences, colloquia, and standalone talks about the core subfields of linguistics, e.g., phonetics, phonology, prosody, morphology, grammar, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, information structure, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and diachronic/historical linguistics. Terms from non-core subfields are occasionally added.
- If you see an entry with two or more numbered sections, the other sections don't necessarily represent separate senses. Most often, they don't. Learners (including me) often benefit by hearing more than one explanation of the same notion, so a SGOL entry often has one or more additional wordings of the same denotation.
- If you notice a copyright or piracy problem here that I should do something about, please reach out to me and describe the problem as specifically as you can. "A problem well defined is half solved." If I can fix it, I will do so on an urgent basis. See my contact email below.
- If you're using SGOL on your phone, it is sometimes useful to turn the phone 90° to landscape mode. The plain-HTML design and the display responsiveness of this website make the portrait-to-landscape transition quite quick.
- The yellow buttons on this page will synoptically show you, roughly, the alphabetical distribution of linguistics terminology. For instance, lemma-initial "C" appears to be the most used in linguistics terminology, if this sample is representative. What do you observe here about the alphabetization domain of our jargon?
- The next time you go from any SGOL page to any other, watch how fast it loads. On my Chromebook, my Android phone, and on every other device I recall using in the past many years, each next page almost always loads completely in half a second or less. Try it yourself and enjoy the speed!
- Why the weird subheadings under MOST RECENTLY ADDED ... ? Each subhead represents two rows of yellow buttons. E.g.,
A-Clausd = (A-Adi) + (Adj-Af) + (Ag-Al) + ... + (C-Car) + (Cas-Chh) + (Chi-Clausd)
- Please note that there is no—no—occasion when SGOL.org will ask you for a donation. No grant proposals are written here, either, and there's no advertising revenue coming in. This project is fully funded by a working-class individual.
- When you see a citation year that is also a link, it will take you to the source as directly as lawfully possible. If a link turns out to be unlawful in spite of my strenuous efforts at copyright compliance, please do let me know!
- When you're done reading a definition, you can get back to this page—SGOL's Main Index—by using either your own Back button or the bottom-of-page Back To Index button.
- The alphabetic distribution seen across this page's yellow buttons was inspired by printed encyclopedias. If instead I were to dedicate each button to one letter, such that you'd see 26 buttons, then some of the linked pages would be gigantically long, while others would be preposterously short. Using this scheme, I can keep the page lengths within a certain range, just as a printed encyclopedia's volumes fall within a certain range of physical thickness and weight.
- When I can't find a definition for a term, but I can find a good number of examples of it being used, I take pleasure in making you an "Easter egg": a reverse-chronological list of the examples. To see what I mean, look up ADJUNCTION SITE, DIALECTAL COLORING, KIDS THESE DAYS, MOVEMENT CHAIN, or STRUCTURAL INTERFERENCE.
- When you or I click or tap here, I want the change to be instant, so my simple coding makes each page change take about 0.25–0.50 seconds. Each of these pages is underlyingly nothing but ASCII characters, i.e., plain text, including the HTML coding, the CSS, and the many symbols whose underlying representations are hand-typed HTML entities, e.g., "RightArrow", or hexadecimal Unicode, e.g., "#x0294".
- In early 2025, this home page grew to have 100 yellow buttons, and I was growing concerned about the amount of scrolling you have to do as you look something up. Because I always keep updating and adding pages, I increasingly wanted to reduce the vertical rate of expansion. Primarily because of smartphone portrait formats, I winced at the obvious way: to horizontally expand the button array from five columns to six. On August 1, with a new batch of pages soon to be made, I felt compelled to test the six-column idea, both on my computer and on my phone. After many little adjustments, I approved of how the six-column page displayed on my computer. As for portrait mode on my phone, it just required a little zooming out; in landscape mode, the page looked great. On August 2, the six-column home page premiered.
- As of [day], [month DD], SGOL's least-recent page update was done in [month {year}], about [number] months ago, to the _____ page.
- Note to Publishers: Please contact me (see below) with any needed corrections or updates, as I do try hard to get citation and web-linking right. I hope that SGOL's "citation-year links" are leading many, many scholars to buy, read, enjoy, and cite your publications. ☺
- The display-responsive site design of SGOL aims at letting you zoom in and out fully in order to make the text quite large or small and still have it fill the screen well. Empirically, there seem to be minor variations in how well this feature works on various devices.
- As of [day], [month DD], SGOL's smallest page (_____) is __ kilobytes; its largest page (_____) is __ kilobytes.
- I'd like you to notice how fast every SGOL page scrolls. Tap any of the yellow buttons above to go to any page. Scroll up and down the page several times as fast as you can. Notice how the page moves every bit as rapidly as your browser, and you experience no lags, because the entirety of every SGOL page is underlyingly just plain old ASCII text/HTML, with no images or anything else that calls for additional downloading or other display delays.
- Since mid-2024, during routine update work, I have been adding subtle bits of previously unused colors to certain SGOL entries, mostly in an effort to add helpful highlights to examples. The palette:
• "eg": Firebrick underline.
• "hi": Green thick underline.
• "hil": Limegreen underline.
• "hil2": Dark Goldenrod underline.
• "st": Steel Blue strike-through
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For a sample of their use, look at INTROVERSION and the three entries that follow it for various combinations of "eg", "hil", and "hil2".
- Please note that I earnestly crave an occasional bit of evidence that SGOL is being used. Even if you can only send a tiny note of acknowledgement, I would feel greatly encouraged in this unpaid work.
Write to psank58 ⟦𝔸𝕋⟧ gmail ⟦𝔻𝕆𝕋⟧ com
- I once did a search, "web browser for text" and found a browser that excludes everything but the text of a webpage. Its output resembles how webpages looked on the first cell phone I ever owned.
When I loaded SGOL into Violoncello, all of the colors disappeared, but otherwise, in a show of great downward compatibility,
○ site navigation was mercurial: every page loaded instantly;
○ the content of each page was arranged normally—everything in its place—on my screen; and
○ each page was fully readable and useful.
The test didn't support a conclusion about Unicode characters. The ones I saw looked fine.
- Would you like to receive a notice when I add or update terms here? Then please use my email address (below) to ask for it, and you will receive a very short and simple email right after I post each update. (I will share your address with nobody.)
- In March 2025, I stepped out of the usual add-and-update pattern and made big changes:
- Moved the StudyLove.org domain name from DotEasy to NameCheap, along with the web hosting service. I apologized for any of the inevitable service interruptions that occurred.
- Bought a new domain name:
SGOL.org It's nothing but a way to get to this Index page without typing the much longer URL that we've all been using since 2013. The longer URL will still work, so if you have bookmarked, shared, or posted it, you don't need to do any broken-link repairs.
- The "SGOL.org grand opening announcement" (LINGUIST List) appeared on April 1.
- Finally curious enough in April 2025, I used "Save As PDF" to estimate how long SGOL would be as a printed volume. After scaling the page like a trade paperback, I came up with a resulting estimate of 1,080 printed pages. After scaling like a journal, the number was 810 pages.
- In April 2025, I submitted the new domain name SGOL.org to the Wayback Machine. I hoped that the Machine would repeatedly archive the entire Glossary, which it wasn't doing before.
Here's the archive: Wayback Machine: SGOL.org
Here's a look back at SGOL in 2015.
- With SGOL having so many pages and entries, I doubt I'll ever get it into a state where all of the details of style and format are the same throughout. Furthermore, I want to keep making improvements. Therefore, I decided to shun perfectionism and allow you to see differences. Some pages have newer features; others don't. If you see that a page looks older, the date at the bottom will probably confirm its older age. (Currently, SGOL's oldest page was last updated on January 27, 2024.)
- In August 2025, I asked Grok AI to describe SGOL and write a scholar-like review. This composite excerpt sums it up:
Overall Evaluation
Sank's Glossary of Linguistics is an admirable and innovative resource that excels in accessibility, neutrality, and creative approaches to documenting linguistic terminology. Its extensive reference links and user-friendly features make it a valuable tool for students and non-specialists, while its commitment to exploring all theories without bias is commendable in a field often divided by theoretical camps. However, its reliance on a single creator without clear scholarly credentials or a peer-review process limits its authority[.]
Recommendation
For students and enthusiasts seeking an accessible entry point into linguistics, SGOL is highly recommended for its clarity and breadth. Scholars and researchers, however, should supplement it with peer-reviewed sources to ensure accuracy and depth. Future enhancements, such as partnerships with linguistic institutions or a formal review process, could elevate SGOL's standing in the field.
- SGOL is theory-neutral. To me, all theories are fun to read about. I pledge allegiance to none.
- Now that the Main Index (this page) has rows of six buttons, versus the previous five, your favorite way to view everything on your phone may be landscape mode. Portrait mode will probably work okay for you, but maybe you'll prefer landscape.
- A year or two before SGOL's first Linguist LIST announcement, I had posted an exclusive debut on the email list of the U. of Pennsylvania linguistics department. Up until that point in time, most of the terms I had been collecting were heard at the annual Penn Linguistics Conference. In the circum-COVID "Zoom era", which fueled a greatly enlarged terms-gathering operation, the Glossary started getting big enough to possibly be of interest, so it seemed fitting to share it there at Penn.
- For a while now (as of September 2025), a new way of adding and improving entries has been coalescing: Instead of doing a full update of a page using terms extracted from the notes I took at just one talk or conference, trying to catch up on a backlog of them, start taking a broad reverse-chrono approach, i.e. draw terms for the update from my most recent talk or conference (for which I've made an extracted terms list) first, and go back in time until I've sought terms from most or all of my lists. When I'm done finding and collecting, I have my to-add list for the full-page update. I add all the terms to the page; then I check the rest of the page for improvement opportunities.
- In 2025, I changed how I choose which terms to add. Soon after, on one of the days of the Annual Meeting on Phonology (U.C. Berkeley), I discovered that I could expect occasionally to enjoy the "hot off the press" excitement of attending a conference or talk at which I happen to hear and write down a term that sits within the alphabetical range of the page I'm working on. In other words, I hear a term, make a new entry or add the information to an existing one, and then post it here at SGOL all on the same day. E.g., on November 22, I Zoomed to the U. of Cyprus for the Symposium on Empirical Approaches to Meaning and Structure (SEAMS). I had been working on F-Fil, and at SEAMS I heard material that I could add to the FILLER and FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCY entries; furthermore, I'd finally be able to call those entries done. Later the same day, the finished entries premiered.
- After "sgol.org" started appearing in the autocomplete of my browser's location bar, I found that I could just type "sg". So, instead of typing nine characters (including ENTER, I now type three.
- A.I. NOTICE: SGOL makes no use of artificial intelligence. If such use ever begins, it will be announced. In the meantime and indefinitely into the future, the definitions and examples that you enjoy here are compiled by "N.I." (natural intelligence), i.e., I type queries into search engines, look for suitable information in the results, select excerpts for inclusion, and assemble everything manually into glossary entries. If I err, it is human.
- One broad thing I've learned from building this resource is that it will always be under construction and never finished. The more terms I add, the more other terms I see that I may never get to. Hence, I hesitate at ever calling SGOL a "dictionary" or an "encyclopedia", and when I see another linguistics tome or site calling itself The ... Dictionary or The ... Encyclopedia, I would bet a day's pay that there would be plenty of terms I would fail to find therein. So, I can't tout SGOL as full and complete, but I hope that its fast navigation and generous entries will keep you coming back.
- As of Saturday, April 11, SGOL's "alphabet census" (in pages), which roughly approximates the alphabetical distribution of linguistics terminology, is
A
F
K
P
U
7+
6
1
12
1
B
G
L
Q
V
1+
1+
6
1
4+
C
H
M
R
W
14
2+
7
5
2+
D
I
N
S
X + Y + Z
8+
7+
3
12
1
E
J
O
T
5+
0+
4
5
- After you hit a yellow button on the Main Index, if you'd like to explore an even faster way to seek terms, try zooming out before looking. Your eyes will then be able to scan a bigger chunk of the page; you'll see more terms in each screenful.
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