Lexical conventions create consistent formats for enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of terminology-related activities. They improve the efficiency of data entry, the interpretability of lexical data by humans (serving as a form of documentation by, e.g., allowing quick identification of names), and the machine readability (e.g., enabling programmatic manipulations of terms). This document is the first of two that specify conventions to be applied when doing terminology work. The current one is applicable to vocabularies currently being maintained at FAO, that are used mainly (though not exclusively) by humans and that can be applied immediately. The second document (Lexical Conventions for Ontologies) specifies naming conventions to be applied to machine-processible semantic structures such as ontologies, which also incorporates the first set of conventions for human-readable vocabularies. They will be used mainly in the context of an ontology-building tool such as Protégé.