Dictionary is a book that contains a selected list of words arranged in alphabetical order. It explains their meanings and gives information about them. In a dictionary, a person can look up a word quickly, discover what it means, and learn how it is pronounced. Most modern dictionaries describe the facts of a language as educated speakers and writers use it. They are called descriptive dictionaries because a dictionary editor does not change the facts of a language. Many older dictionaries tried to prescribe rules, some of which did not agree with the way people commonly talked or wrote. These books are called prescriptive dictionaries.
What dictionaries contain
Dictionaries give the meanings of many kinds of words. Most general dictionaries include (1) the ordinary words of everyday life, such as bread, run, and with; (2) literary words used in formal writing, such as aggregation, despoil, and incontrovertible; (3) technical words, such as starboard, genome, and ratio; (4) words used chiefly on informal occasions, such as gab and wimp; (5) words used in writing to give an old-fashioned flavor, such as aweary and avaunt; (6) words not used today but found in the writings of some authors, such as plaister for plaster; (7) words or phrases from other languages, such as coup d’etat from French, tofu from Japanese, and barrio from Spanish; (8) idioms (groups of words with meanings different from their literal meanings), such as split hairs and under the thumb of; (9) abbreviations, such as U.S.A., Kans., and p.; and (10) important proper names, such as Buddha and Jupiter.
No dictionary records all the words of our language. In fact, no one knows exactly how many English words there are. Besides ordinary words used in everyday speech, the English language includes thousands of geographical names. There are thousands of words that are no longer used. And there are hundreds of thousands of technical terms, including more than 750,000 names of insects alone. New words are coined for new scientific and technical discoveries, and slang words and special vocabularies constantly spring up. As nations draw closer together through trade and travel, satellite communication, and sharing of technology, languages tend to borrow more and more words from each other. That is why dictionary editors must be selective in the words they decide to include.
Most dictionaries tell us much more than just the meanings of words. Many list pronunciations, derivations, prefixes and suffixes, illustrative quotations, synonyms and antonyms, usage notes, and other information.
Kinds of dictionaries
Dictionaries may be classified as general dictionaries and specialized dictionaries. A general dictionary contains information on everyday words such as it and the. But it also defines many technical terms such as chromatography and columella. A specialized dictionary omits most everyday terms, and limits itself to information on words used in a particular field, such as biology.
General dictionaries
range in size from small pocket dictionaries to large multivolume or table dictionaries. The number of entries in a general dictionary depends on its purpose. Each dictionary is designed to answer the questions of a certain type of reader. A sixth-grade student, for example, would not want all the information given in a dictionary a college professor would use. For this reason, dictionary editors work hard to design their products to suit the needs of their intended audiences. They know that the usefulness of any dictionary depends on the education of the user and the kind of information the user wishes to find.
A general dictionary may be designed for use by elementary-school students, high-school students, or college students. It may also be designed for use by the general reader, or even by the entire family. The World Book Dictionary is an example of a dictionary designed for family use.
The largest general dictionaries may contain over 400,000 entries. When a dictionary has this many entries, many obsolete and technical terms are included. Other general dictionaries may have from 15,000 entries to 200,000 entries.
Specialized dictionaries
are designed to give more information in particular fields than general dictionaries can. A gazetteer (geographical dictionary) lists the names of cities, countries, islands, lakes, and other places. It gives the pronunciation of each name and a brief description. A biographical dictionary lists and gives the pronunciation of the names of important people. Each entry includes birth and death dates, nationality, and why the person is remembered. A thesaurus contains lists of synonyms and antonyms. Other specialized dictionaries are devoted to usage; idioms; pronunciations; slang; spelling; new words and meanings; and various aspects of science and technology. Research or scholarly dictionaries may cover the vocabulary of earlier periods of a language, such as Old English or Late Latin. Some are also devoted to various dialects, such as Scottish or South African English. There are dictionaries of all the major languages. Bilingual dictionaries translate the words of one language into another.
How to use a dictionary
Before using a dictionary, one should become familiar with the methods, principles, and scope of the book because various dictionaries are arranged in different ways. Many American dictionaries arrange all entries in a single alphabetical list. Others put abbreviations, geographical and biographical names, and foreign words and phrases in separate lists, usually at the end of the book. All good dictionaries today have introductory sections that explain what the book contains and how it is arranged.
The first thing a dictionary entry shows is how to spell a word and how to divide it into syllables. Accent marks and symbols that are explained in the book tell how to pronounce the word. Many dictionaries also tell what part of speech the word is. For example, they list boy as a noun, and speak as a verb.
Definitions of the word usually follow. Some dictionaries list the most commonly used meaning of the word first. Others arrange the meanings historically, so that the first meaning listed is the one that occurred first in the language. Some dictionaries also use the word in a sentence or phrase to help define it. Sometimes pictures or drawings are added to provide more information about the entry.
After the definitions, many dictionaries include a list of synonyms, or words with about the same meaning as the words being defined. Other information is often included about etymology (the history or origin of a word). Many dictionaries also have usage labels, such as Slang and Dialect; subject labels, such as Biology or Electronics; and regional labels, such as British or U.S. In addition, usage notes explain important points about the way a word is commonly used.
History
The word dictionary comes from the medieval Latin word dictionarium, which in turn came from the Latin dictio, meaning word or saying. The ancient Greeks and Romans were the first to produce these works. But most Greek and Latin dictionaries were either lists of rare and difficult words or specialized lists of words.
During the Middle Ages, scholars made much use of Latin dictionaries which explained hard Latin words in easier Latin. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, as Latin began to lose ground to English, French, German, and other national languages of Europe, scholars began to rely on glossaries to understand Latin manuscripts. The glossaries usually gave the meanings of hard Latin words in the words of the national language. As these languages became accepted in each country, people needed new dictionaries to explain the hard words of their own language in terms of simpler words in the same language.
Early English dictionaries.
In 1604, Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster, prepared the first English dictionary. Called A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Wordes, it defined about 3,000 English words that had been taken from other languages. Larger dictionaries that offered more information about the words they contained were produced in the 1600’s. In 1721, Nathan Bailey published a dictionary containing about 60,000 words. This was the first English dictionary that tried to include most English words instead of hard words only.
In the early 1700’s, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and other literary men of England wanted to prepare a dictionary that would set the standard for good usage in English. French and Italian scholars had already published such prescriptive dictionaries in their languages, and this success influenced the literary men of England.
Samuel Johnson undertook the task of preparing an English dictionary. He spent several years selecting quotations from the best writers to illustrate the meanings of words. He came to the conclusion that language could not be “fixed” or prescribed, only described to the best of one’s ability. Johnson finally published his great work, A Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755. With John Walker’s Critical and Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), it served as the standard for information about English words until the mid-1800’s.
In 1806, Noah Webster published a small school dictionary in the United States. Webster wanted to set up an American standard of good usage to compare with the British standard set by Johnson and Walker. In his dictionary, Webster simplified many older spellings, such as music for musick. In 1828, Webster published a dictionary containing 70,000 entries. Since then, Webster’s dictionaries have been frequently revised and are widely used today.
Modern dictionaries.
The period of national dictionaries gave way to scholarly dictionaries in the mid-1800’s. In Germany, the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm began work on a historical dictionary of the German language. In France, Emile Littre compiled a dictionary of modern French. In England, John Ogilvie edited a dictionary that later served as the basis of The Century Dictionary. Various current English dictionaries trace their development back to The Century Dictionary.
Probably the greatest scholarly dictionary to appear in any language is A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. It appeared in parts from 1884 to 1928 and has almost 415,000 entries. In 1933, it was published in 12 volumes, with a one-volume supplement, as the Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.). This dictionary gives a historical record of each word in written English. No other dictionary in any language approaches the O.E.D. in wealth and authority of historical detail. In 1989, a 20-volume second edition of the O.E.D. was published that integrated the 1928 edition with four supplementary volumes issued between 1972 and 1986. The historical method used to compile the O.E.D. was also used in making A Dictionary of Canadianisms (1967) and the Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967).
Current dictionaries sold in the United States and Canada include Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, with about 475,000 entries, the most complete modern American dictionary of the English language. The World Book Dictionary, which consists of around 250,000 definitions, is designed for family use. It was the first dictionary especially designed to be used with a specific encyclopedia.
Many dictionary publishers offer basic, intermediate, and high school dictionaries that contain from as few as 18,000 to as many as 100,000 entries. College dictionaries have about 150,000 entries. Publishers have also adapted some dictionaries for computer use. These dictionaries are published on the internet, or in electronic form on DVD’s.
