What Are Lexical Sets and How Will They Help You as an Actor?
What Exactly Are Lexical Sets?
A lexical set is simply a group of words that share the same vowel sound in their stressed syllable. The system was created by phonetician John Wells in 1982, who gave each set a memorable name using a common English word as an example.
For instance, the KIT lexical set includes words like bit, gym, pretty, and women. Even though these words are spelled differently, they all contain the same vowel sound in their stressed syllable. The brilliant thing about this system is that it organises English vowels into 24 manageable categories, each named after a simple word we all know.
