The work of Ana Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard studied 'Semantic Primes', 'the set of semantic concepts that are innately understood but cannot be expressed in simpler terms'.
The combination of a set of semantic primes and the rules of combining them forms a 'Natural Semantic Metalanguage' , which is the core from which all the words in a given language would be built up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes
The combination of a set of semantic primes and the rules of combining them forms a 'Natural Semantic Metalanguage' , which is the core from which all the words in a given language would be built up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage
The current agreed-upon number of semantic primes is 65 (see list at wikipedia links above).
That means that any English word can be defined using a lexicon of about 65 concepts in the English natural semantic metalanguage.