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Dictionary, reference book that lists words in order—usually, for Western languages, alphabetical—and gives their meanings. In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide information about their pronunciation, grammatical forms and functions, etymologies, syntactic peculiarities, variant spellings, and antonyms. A dictionary may also provide quotations illustrating a word’s use, and these may be dated to show the earliest known uses of the word in specified senses. The word
The Oxford English Dictionary
Basically, a dictionary lists a set of words with information about them. The list may attempt to be a complete inventory of a language or may be only a small segment of it. A short list, sometimes at the back of a book, is often called a glossary. When a word list is an index to a limited body of writing, with references to each passage, it is called a concordance. Theoretically, a good dictionary could be compiled by organizing into one list a large number of concordances. A word list that consists of geographic names only is called a gazetteer.
Designates a wordbook, but it also has a special abstract meaning among linguists, referring to the body of separable structural units of which the language is made up. In this sense, a preliterate culture has a lexicon long before its units are written in a dictionary. Scholars in England sometimes use
The compilation of a dictionary is lexicography; lexicology is a branch of linguistics in which, with the utmost scientific rigour, the theories that lexicographers use in the solution of their problems are developed.
New Dictionary Words — Winter 2023
Takes for granted that alphabetical order will be followed, and yet the alphabetical order has been called a tyranny that makes dictionaries less useful than they might be if compiled in some other order. (So too,
Becomes a meaningless term for any language that lacks an alphabet.) The assembling of words into groups related by some principle, as by their meanings, can be done, and such a work is often called a thesaurus or synonymy. Such works, however, need an index for ease of reference, and it is unlikely that alphabetical order will be superseded except in specialized works.
The distinction between a dictionary and an encyclopaedia is easy to state but difficult to carry out in a practical way: a dictionary explains words, whereas an encyclopaedia explains things. Because words achieve their usefulness by reference to things, however, it is difficult to construct a dictionary without considerable attention to the objects and abstractions designated.
The Power Of The Dictionary
A monolingual dictionary has both the word list and the explanations in the same language, whereas bilingual or multilingual (polyglot) dictionaries have the explanations in another language or different languages. The word
Is also extended, in a loose sense, to reference books with entries in alphabetical order, such as a dictionary of biography, a dictionary of heraldry, or a dictionary of plastics.
This article, after an account of the development of dictionaries from Classical times to the recent past, treats the kinds of dictionaries and their features and problems. It concludes with a brief section on some of the major dictionaries that are available. Examples for the sections on the types of dictionaries and on their features and problems are drawn primarily from the products of English lexicographers.
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In the long perspective of human evolutionary development, dictionaries have been known through only a slight fraction of language history. People at first simply talked without having any authoritative backing from reference books. A short Akkadian word list, from central Mesopotamia, has survived from the 7th century bce. The Western tradition of dictionary making began among the Greeks, although not until the language had changed so much that explanations and commentaries were needed. After a 1st-century-ce lexicon by Pamphilus of Alexandria, many lexicons were compiled in Greek, the most important being those of the Atticists in the 2nd century, that of Hesychius of Alexandria in the 5th century, and that of Photius and the
In the Middle Ages. (The Atticists were compilers of lists of words and phrases thought to be in accord with the usage of the Athenians.)
Because Latin was a much-used language of great prestige well into modern times, its monumental dictionaries were important and later influenced English lexicography. In the 1st century bce, Marcus Terentius Varro wrote the treatise
Abstract Nouns: Definition And Usage Made Clear
; the extant books of its section of etymology are valuable for their citations from Latin poets. At least five medieval Scholastics—Papias the Lombard, Alexander Neckam, Johannes de Garlandia (John Garland), Hugo of Pisa, and Giovanni Balbi of Genoa—turned their attention to dictionaries. The mammoth work of Ambrogio Calepino, published at Reggio (now Reggio nell’Emilia, Italy) in 1502, incorporating several other languages besides Latin, was so popular that
Came to be an ordinary word for a dictionary. A Lancashire will of 1568 contained the provision: “I will that Henry Marrecrofte shall have my calepin and my paraphrases.” This is an early instance of the tendency that, several centuries later, caused people to say, “Look in Johnson” or “Look in Webster.”
Because language problems within a single language do not loom so large to ordinary people as those that arise in the learning of a different language, the interlingual dictionaries developed early and had great importance. The corporation records of Boston, Lincolnshire, have the following entry for the year 1578:
Kia Ora E Hoa: Dozens Of New Zealand And Māori Words Added To Oxford English Dictionary
That a dictionary shall be bought for the scholars of the Free School, and the same book to be tied in a chain, and set upon a desk in the school, whereunto any scholar may have access, as occasion shall serve.
The origin of the bilingual lists can be traced to a practice of the early Middle Ages, that of writing interlinear glosses—explanations of difficult words—in manuscripts. It is but a step for these glosses to be collected together at the back of a manuscript and then for the various lists—glossaries—to be assembled in another manuscript. Some of these have survived from the 7th and 8th centuries—and in some cases they preserve the earliest recorded forms in English.
The first bilingual glossary to find its way into print was a French-English vocabulary for the use of travelers, printed in England by William Caxton without a title page, in 1480. The words and expressions appeared in parallel columns on 26 leaves. Next came a Latin-English vocabulary by a noted grammarian, John Stanbridge, published by Richard Pynson in 1496 and reprinted frequently. But far more substantial in character was an English-Latin vocabulary called the
Cunt Definition & Meaning
(“Storehouse for Children or Clerics”) commonly attributed to Geoffrey the Grammarian (Galfridus Grammaticus), a Dominican friar of Norfolk, who is thought to have composed it about 1440.
(“Elucidation of the French Tongue”). Palsgrave was a tutor of French in London, and a letter has survived showing that he arranged with his printer that no copy should be sold without his permission,
Lest his profit by teaching the French tongue might be minished by the sale of the same to such persons as, besides him, were disposed to study the said tongue.
Digging Up Old Slang For Body Parts
. The encouragement of Henry VIII was responsible for an important Latin-English dictionary that appeared in 1538 from the hand of Sir Thomas Elyot. Thomas Cooper enlarged it in subsequent editions and in 1565 brought out a new work based upon it—
His wife…was irreconcilably angry with him for sitting-up late at night so, compiling his Dictionary….When he had half-done it, she had the opportunity to get into his study, took all his pains out in her lap, and threw it into the fire, and burnt it. Well, for all that, that good man had so great a zeal for the advancement of learning, that he began it again, and went through with it to that perfection that he hath left it to us, a most useful work.
, for it contained a greater number of English words than had before appeared in any similar dictionary. In 1556 appeared the first edition by John Withals of
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, which gained greater circulation (to judge by the frequency of editions) than any other book of its kind. Many other lexicographers contributed to the development of dictionaries. Certain dictionaries were more ambitious and included a number of languages, such as John Baret’s work of 1573,
. In his preface Baret acknowledged that the work was brought together by his students in the course of their exercises, and the title
The interlingual dictionaries had a far greater stock of English words than were to be found in the earliest all-English dictionaries, and the compilers of the English dictionaries, strangely enough, never took full advantage of these sources. It may be surmised, however, that people in general sometimes consulted the interlingual dictionaries for the English vocabulary. The anonymous
