Chapter 9   English Dictionaries （2）

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 Content of Dictionary

•      Dictionaries vary widely in terms of different purposes. If you want to make full use of the dictionary, you need to have a good idea of what exactly it contains. Despite the differences in scope, length and depth, dictionaries generally cover some or all of the following.

•  1. spelling: due to the wide divergence between the spelling system and the pronunciation, even native speaking learners have difficulty in spelling. The dictionary, a best friend of poor spellers, gives accepted spelling for all the words. Besides, one can also find in a dictionary the different forms of irregular verbs, adjectives, and compounds. As a matter of fact, there are many rules of spelling, but almost all have exceptions. Thus the only safe rule is: when in doubt, look up the word in the dictionary and it will tell you the fact.

•  2. Pronunciation: British and American dictionaries provide their respective standard pronunciation for the reader‘s reference. As for the pronunciation standard, British dictionaries, generally speaking, use the Oxford's system or International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA), while American ones employ the Webster’s.

•  3. Grammatical information: dictionaries class words in accordance with the eight traditional parts of speech, inflections and other grammatical information, including a good system of verb patterns.

•  4. Etymology(词源): the etymology of a word is its history. The main items of etymological information are: origin of a word, cognate words in Germanic languages and other Indo-European languages,  change of meaning and etymological structure of the word, which are valuable for researchers and language professionals.

•  5. Definition: no doubt, the main body of the dictionary is the definitions of words—the explanation of the headword meaning. As most words are polysemantic, the senses of words are arranged in different ways, either chronologically, or in order of popularity. That is, the definitions may proceed from the first emerged meaning to the most recent, or from the most common meaning to the least common. In practice, most of the desk dictionaries probably follow Thorndike’s ['θɔ:ndaik] principle: literal uses come before figurative, general uses before special, common uses before rare, and easily understandable uses before difficult. This  kind of arrangement is  best for any word which helps the learners most.

•  6. Usage labeling: teachers and students generally find usage labeling essentially helpful. In most medium-sized dictionaries, one may find some of the following: 1) temporal labels: archaic, old-fashioned, rare, obsolete; 2) regional labels: British, Canadian, Scottish; 3) style labels: formal, informal, colloquial, slang, biblical; 4) field labels: linguistics, philosophy, psychology; 5)linguistic labels: poetic  [pəʊˈetɪk], literary, and other labels.

•  7. Related forms: along with the grammatical information, some dictionaries include related forms of the word in each entry, among which derivatives  [di'rivətivz], compounds, synonyms, antonyms are most likely to appear.

•  8. Frequency: with the creation of large English corpora, lexicographers now know a great deal about word frequency and they mark it in the dictionaries. In Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English(2003), it marks the first 3,000 most common English words, used in speech and writing.

•  9. Illustrations: Many dictionaries have illustrations, with the main purpose to provide visual support for description of the meaning content of linguistic units. Here is an illustration from Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English

• 10. supplementary matters: Apart from its main body, a dictionary has many supplementary matters, among which are irregular verbs, common first names, geographical names, numbers, punctuation, and so on.