The word dictionary comes from the

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A dictionary is a type of book which explains the meanings of words or, more precisely, lexemes. The words are arranged in alphabetical order so that they can be found quickly. The word «dictionary» comes from the Latin «dictio» («saying»).

There are several types of dictionaries: dictionaries which explain words and how they are used, dictionaries which translate words from one language to another, dictionaries of biography which tell about famous people, technical dictionaries which explain the meanings of technical words or words connected to a particular subject (sometimes called a thesaurus). Some of these come close to being an encyclopedia, but an encyclopedia gives a lot of extra information about things (knowledge) and does not explain the use of the language. An encyclopedic dictionary gives less information about the topic than a real encyclopedia does, but more than a simple dictionary.

Dictionaries which explain the meaning of words[change | change source]

Online dictionaries[change | change source]

• TheFreeDictionary
• Longman English Dictionary Online

Dictionaries which explain what words mean will give a clear «definition» of the word (e.g. hippopotamus : a hoofed mammal with thick skin, large mouth and short legs that lives in rivers and lakes of Africa.)

A big dictionary will also give more information about the word. It will explain how it is pronounced. Usually the International Phonetic Alphabet is used for this. It will explain how the word is used. This is not a problem for a word like «hippopotamus», but a word like «put» has so many different meanings that a large dictionary may have a whole page or more to explain how it can be used. It will also explain the origin of the word (e.g. Greek «hippos» horse and «potamus» river).

A dictionary may also give the form of the word in different tenses, plural form etc.

Dictionaries which translate into foreign languages[change | change source]

There are also dictionaries which translate words into foreign languages. Often one volume (one book) will translate both ways; for example, half the book might be translating from English to Dutch and the other half from Dutch to English.

When using a dictionary to find out how to say something in another language one has to be careful to choose the right word. A word like «right» has two basic meanings in English: 1) «correct», and 2) the opposite of «left». Other languages have different words for these different meanings, but they have homonyms of their own. A word like «put» has many meanings. A good dictionary will have a large list of these meanings to help people find the word they want. In many languages, for example, the word “put” will be different according to whether something is being put onto something (e.g. a table) or into something (e.g. a cupboard).

Updating dictionaries[change | change source]

Dictionaries need to be updated frequently because of the way language changes. New words are often brought into a language (e.g. lots of computer terms) or words change their meanings (e.g. «gay» or «cool»). In this sense, the most famous English Dictionary is the Oxford English Dictionary (or OED). Words are always being added to the OED. They are never taken out even if they are obsolete (not used any more). The OED can be accessed online (with a subscription).

[change | change source]

• Wiktionary

Relevant literature[change | change source]

• Henning Bergenholtz/Sven Tarp (eds.): Manual of Specialised Lexicography. Benjamins 1995.
• Sandro Nielsen: The Bilingual LSP Dictionary. Gunter Narr 1994.

Other websites[change | change source]

• Centre for Lexicography Archived 2011-08-09 at the Wayback Machine
• Dictionary -Citizendium

• Oxford English Dictionary
• Oxford Learner’s Dictionary
• Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary (British English)
• Macmillan Dictionary
• Collins Cobuild English Dictionary
• American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
• Merriam-Webster American English dictionary
• Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary
• Learn These Words First: Multi-Layer Dictionary
• SimpleVocab Multi-word Dictionary
• English to English Dictionary
• Terms Dictionary — English to Multi-Lang Dictionary Archived 2020-01-01 at the Wayback Machine

/dik»sheuh ner’ee/, n., pl. dictionaries.

1. a book containing a selection of the words of a language, usually arranged alphabetically, giving information about their meanings, pronunciations, etymologies, inflected forms, etc., expressed in either the same or another language; lexicon; glossary: a dictionary of English; a Japanese-English dictionary.

2. a book giving information on particular subjects or on a particular class of words, names, or facts, usually arranged alphabetically: a biographical dictionary; a dictionary of mathematics.

3. Computers.

a. a list of codes, terms, keys, etc., and their meanings, used by a computer program or system.

b. a list of words used by a word-processing program as the standard against which to check the spelling of text entered.

[1520-30; < ML dictionarium, dictionarius < LL diction- word (see DICTION) + -arium, -arius -ARY]

* * *

Reference work that lists words, usually in alphabetical order, and gives their meanings and often other information such as pronunciations, etymologies, and variant spellings.

The earliest dictionaries, such as those created by Greeks of the 1st century AD, emphasized changes that had occurred in the meanings of words over time. The close juxtaposition of languages in Europe led to the appearance, from the early Middle Ages on, of many bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. The movement to produce an English dictionary was partly prompted by a desire for wider literacy, so that common people could read Scripture, and partly by a frustration that no regularity in spelling existed in the language. The first purely English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical (1604), treating some 3,000 words. In 1746–47 Samuel Johnson undertook the most ambitious English dictionary to that time, a list of 43,500 words. Noah Webster’s dictionary of Americanisms in the early 19th century sprang from a recognition of the changes and variations within language. The immense Oxford English Dictionary was begun in the late 19th century. Today there are various levels of dictionaries, general-purpose dictionaries being most common. Modern lexicographers (dictionary makers) describe current and past language but rarely prescribe its use.

* * *

▪ reference work

Introduction

      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 dictionary comes from the Latin dictio, “the act of speaking,” and dictionarius, “a collection of words.” Although they are a different type of reference work, there are encyclopaedias (encyclopaedia) that use the word dictionary in their name (e.g., biographical dictionaries).

      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.

      The word lexicon 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 lexis to designate this lexical element of language.

      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.

      The phrase dictionary order 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, dictionary order 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.

      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 dictionary 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.

Historical background

From Classical times to 1604

      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 Suda 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 (Latin literature) was a much-used language (Latin 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 (Varro, Marcus Terentius) wrote the treatise De lingua Latina; 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 (Calepino, Ambrogio), published at Reggio (now Reggio nell’Emilia, Italy) in 1502, incorporating several other languages besides Latin, was so popular that calepin 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:

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 (English literature).

      The first bilingual glossary to find its way into print was a French-English (French language) vocabulary for the use of travelers, printed in England by William Caxton (Caxton, William) without a title page, in 1480. The words and expressions appeared in parallel columns on 26 leaves. Next came a Latin-English vocabulary (English language) 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 Promptorius puerorum (“Storehouse [of words] for Children”) brought out by Pynson in 1499. It is better known under its later title of Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum (“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.

      The next important dictionary to be published was an English-French one by John (or Jehan) Palsgrave in 1530, Lesclaircissement de la langue francoise (“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.

      A Welsh-English dictionary by William Salesbury (Salesbury, William) in 1547 brought another language into requisition: A Dictionary in English and Welsh. The encouragement of Henry VIII was responsible for an important Latin-English dictionary that appeared in 1538 from the hand of Sir Thomas Elyot (Elyot, Sir Thomas). Thomas Cooper (Cooper, Thomas) enlarged it in subsequent editions and in 1565 brought out a new work based upon it—Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (“Thesaurus of the Roman Tongue and the British”). A hundred years later John Aubrey (Aubrey, John), in Brief Lives, recorded Cooper’s misfortune while compiling 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.

      More important still was Richard Huloet’s work of 1552, Abecedarium Anglo-Latinum, 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 A Short Dictionary for Young Beginners, 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, An Alveary, or Triple Dictionary, in English, Latin, and French. In his preface Baret acknowledged that the work was brought together by his students in the course of their exercises, and the title Alveary was to commemorate their “beehive” of industry. The first rhyming dictionary, by Peter Levens, was produced in 1570—Manipulus Vocabulorum. A Dictionary of English and Latin Words, Set Forth in Such Order, as None Heretofore Hath Been.

      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 author of The Art of English Poesy, thought to be George Puttenham (Puttenham, George), wrote in 1589 concerning the adoption of southern speech as the standard:

herein we are already ruled by th’ English Dictionaries and other books written by learned men, and therefore is needeth none other direction in that behalf.

      The mainstream of English lexicography is the word list explained in English. The first known English-English glossary grew out of the desire of the supporters of the Reformation that even the most humble Englishman should be able to understand the Scriptures. William Tyndale (Tyndale, William), when he printed the Pentateuch on the Continent in 1530, included “a table expounding certain words.” The following entries (quoted here with unmodernized spellings) are typical:

● Albe, a longe garment of white lynen.

● Boothe, an housse made of bowes.

● Brestlappe or brestflappe, is soche a flappe as thou seist in the brest or a cope.

● Consecrate, to apoynte a thinge to holy uses.

● Dedicate, purifie or sanctifie.

● Slyme was…a fattenesse that osed out of the erth lykeunto tarre / And thou mayst call it cement / if thou wilt.

● Tabernacle, an house made tentwise, or as a pauelion.

● Vapor / a dewymiste / as the smoke of a sethynge pott.

      Spelling reformers long had a deep interest in producing English dictionaries. In 1569 one such reformer, John Hart, lamented the greatness of the “disorders and confusions” of spelling. But a few years later the phonetician William Bullokar promised to produce such a work and stated, “A dictionary and grammar may stay our speech in a perfect use for ever.”

      Schoolmasters also had a strong interest in the development of dictionaries. In 1582 Richard Mulcaster (Mulcaster, Richard), of the Merchant Taylors’ school and later of St. Paul’s, expressed the wish that some learned and laborious man “would gather all the words which we use in our English tongue,” and in his book commonly referred to as The Elementary he listed about 8,000 words, without definitions, in a section called “The General Table.” Another schoolmaster, Edmund Coote, of Bury St. Edmund’s, in 1596 brought out The English Schoolmaster, Teaching All His Scholars of What Age Soever the Most Easy Short & Perfect Order of Distinct Reading & True Writing Our English Tongue, with a table that consisted of about 1,400 words, sorted out by different typefaces on the basis of etymology. This is important, because what is known as the “first” English dictionary, eight years later, was merely an adaptation and enlargement of Coote’s table.

From 1604 to 1828

      In 1604 at London appeared the first purely English dictionary to be issued as a separate work, titled A Table Alphabetical, Containing and Teaching the True Writing and Understanding of Hard Usual English Words, Borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or French &c., by Robert Cawdrey, who had been a schoolmaster at Oakham, Rutland, about 1580 and in 1604 was living at Coventry. He had the collaboration of his son Thomas, a schoolmaster in London. This work contained about 3,000 words but was so dependent upon three sources that it can rightly be called a plagiarism. The basic outline was taken over from Coote’s work of 1596, with 87 percent of his word list adopted. Further material was taken from the Latin-English dictionary by Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (1588). But the third source is most remarkable. In 1599 a Dutchman known only as A.M. translated from Latin into English a famous medical work by Oswald Gabelkhouer, The Boock of Physicke, published at Dort, in the Netherlands. As he had been away from England for many years and had forgotten much of his English, A.M. sometimes merely put English endings on Latin words. When friends told him that Englishmen would not understand them, he compiled a list of them, explained by a simpler synonym, and put it at the end of the book. Samples are:

Puluerisated, reade beaten; Frigifye, reade coole; Madefye, reade dipp; Calefye, reade heat; Circumligate, reade binde; Ebulliated, read boyled.

      Thus, the fumblings of a Dutchman who knew little English (in fact, his errata) were poured into Cawdrey’s word list. But other editions of Cawdrey were called for—a second in 1609, a third in 1613, and a fourth in 1617.

      The next dictionary, by John Bullokar, An English Expositor, is first heard of on May 25, 1610, when it was entered in the Stationers’ Register (which established the printer’s right to it), but it was not printed until six years later. Bullokar introduced many archaisms, marked with a star (“only used of some ancient writers, and now grown out of use”), such as aye, eld, enewed, fremd, gab, and glee. The work had 14 editions, the last as late as 1731.

      Still in the tradition of hard words was the next work, in 1623, by Henry Cockeram, the first to have the word dictionary in its title: The English Dictionary; or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words. It added many words that have never appeared anywhere else—adpugne, adstupiate, bulbitate, catillate, fraxate, nixious, prodigity, vitulate, and so on. Much fuller than its predecessors was Thomas Blount’s work of 1656, Glossographia; or, A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words…As Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue. He made an important forward step in lexicographical method by collecting words from his own reading that had given him trouble, and he often cited the source. Much of Blount’s material was appropriated two years later by Edward Phillips, a nephew of the poet John Milton (Milton, John), for a work called The New World of English Words, and Blount castigated him bitterly.

Thus far, the English lexicographers had all been men who made dictionaries in their leisure time or as an avocation, but in 1702 appeared a work by the first professional lexicographer, John Kersey the Younger. This work, A New English Dictionary, incorporated much from the tradition of spelling books and discarded most of the fantastic words that had beguiled earlier lexicographers. As a result, it served the reasonable needs of ordinary users of the language. Kersey later produced some bigger works, but all these were superseded in the 1720s when Nathan Bailey, a schoolmaster in Stepney, issued several innovative works. In 1721 he produced An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, which for the rest of the century was more popular even than Samuel Johnson’s. A supplement in 1727 was the first dictionary to mark accents for pronunciation. Bailey’s imposing Dictionarium Britannicum of 1730 was used by Johnson as a repository during the compilation of the monumental dictionary of 1755.

      Many literary men felt the inadequacy of English dictionaries, particularly in view of the continental examples. The Crusca Academy, of Florence, founded in 1582, brought out its Vocabolario at Venice in 1612, filled with copious quotations from Italian (Italian language) literature. The French Academy produced its dictionary in 1694, but two other French dictionaries were actually more scholarly—that of César-Pierre Richelet in 1680 and that of Antoine Furetière in 1690. In Spain (Spanish language) the Royal Spanish Academy, founded in 1713, produced its Diccionario de la lengua Castellana (1726–39) in six thick volumes. The foundation work of German (German language) lexicography, by Johann Leonhard Frisch, Teutsch-Lateinisches Wörterbuch, in 1741, freely incorporated quotations in German. The Russian (Russian language) Academy of Arts (St. Petersburg) published the first edition of its dictionary somewhat later, from 1789 to 1794. Both the French and the Russian academies arranged the first editions of their dictionaries in etymological order but changed to alphabetical order in the second editions.

      In England, in 1707, the antiquary Humphrey Wanley set down in a list of “good books wanted,” which he hoped the Society of Antiquaries would undertake: “A dictionary (Dictionary of the English Language, A) for fixing the English language, as the French and Italian.” A number of noted authors made plans to fulfill this aim (Joseph Addison (Addison, Joseph), Alexander Pope (Pope, Alexander), and others), but it remained for a promising poet and critic, Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel), to bring such a project to fulfillment. Five leading booksellers of London banded together to support his undertaking, and a contract was signed on June 18, 1746. Next year Johnson’s Plan was printed, a prospectus of 34 pages, consisting of a discussion of language that can still be read as a masterpiece in its judicious consideration of linguistic problems.

      With the aid of six amanuenses to copy quotations, Johnson read widely in the literature up to his time and gathered the central word-stock of the English language. He included about 43,500 words (a few more than the number in Bailey), but they were much better selected and represented the keen judgment of a man of letters. He was sympathetic to the desire of that age to “fix” the language, but he realized as he went ahead that “language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived.” At most, he felt that he could curb “the lust for innovation.”

The chief glory of Johnson’s dictionary was its 118,000 illustrative quotations. No doubt some of these were included for their beauty, but mostly they served as the basis for his sense discriminations. No previous lexicographer had the temerity to divide the verb take, transitive, into 113 senses and the intransitive into 21 more. The definitions often have a quaint ring to modern readers because the science of the age was either not well developed or was not available to him. But mostly the definitions show a sturdy common sense, except when Johnson used long words sportively. His etymologies reflect the state of philology in his age. Usually they were an improvement on those of his predecessors, because he had as a guide the Etymologicum Anglicanum of Franciscus Junius the Younger (Junius, Franciscus, The Younger), as edited by Edward Lye, which became available in 1743 and which provided guidance for the important Germanic element of the language.

      Four editions of the Dictionary were issued during Johnson’s lifetime; in particular the fourth, in 1773, received much personal care in revision. The Dictionary retained its supremacy for many decades and received lavish, although not universal, praise; some would-be rivals were bitter in criticism. A widely heralded work of the 1780s and 1790s was the projected dictionary of Herbert Croft, in a manuscript of 200 quarto volumes, that was to be called the Oxford English Dictionary. Croft was, however, unable to get it into print.

      The practice of marking word stress was taken over from the spelling books by Bailey in his Dictionary of 1727, but a full-fledged pronouncing dictionary was not produced until 1757, by James Buchanan; his was followed by those of William Kenrick (1773), William Perry (1775), Thomas Sheridan (1780), and John Walker (1791), whose decisions were regarded as authoritative, especially in the United States.

      The attention to dictionaries was thoroughly established in American schools in the 18th century. Benjamin Franklin (Franklin, Benjamin), in 1751, in his pamphlet “Idea of the English School,” said, “Each boy should have an English dictionary to help him over difficulties.” The master of an English grammar school in New York in 1771, Hugh Hughes, announced: “Every one of this Class will have Johnson’s Dictionary in Octavo.” These were imported from England, because the earliest dictionary printed in the United States (American literature) was in 1788, when Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts, issued an edition of Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary. The first dictionary compiled in America was A School Dictionary by Samuel Johnson, Jr. (not a pen name), printed in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1798. Another, by Caleb Alexander, was called The Columbian Dictionary of the English Language (1800) and on the title page claimed that “many new words, peculiar to the United States,” were inserted. It received abuse from critics who were not yet ready for the inclusion of American words.

      In spite of such attitudes, Noah Webster (Webster, Noah), already well known for his spelling books and political essays, embarked on a program of compiling three dictionaries of different sizes that included Americanisms. In his announcement on June 4, 1800, he titled the largest one A Dictionary of the American Language. He brought out his small dictionary for schools, the Compendious, in 1806 but then engaged in a long course of research into the relation of languages, in order to strengthen his etymologies. At last, in 1828, at age 70, he published his masterwork, in two thick volumes, with the title An American Dictionary of the English Language (American Dictionary of the English Language, An). His change of title reflects his growing conservatism and his recognition of the fundamental unity of the English language. His selection of the word list and his well-phrased definitions made his work superior to previous works, although he did not give illustrative quotations but merely cited the names of authors. The dictionary’s worth was recognized, although Webster himself was always at the centre of a whirlpool of controversy.

Since 1828

      It was Webster’s misfortune to be superseded in his philology in the very decade that his masterpiece came out. He had spent many years in compiling a laborious “Synopsis” of 20 languages, but he lacked an awareness of the systematic relationships in the Indo-European family of languages (Indo-European languages). Germanic scholars such as Franz Bopp (Bopp, Franz) and Rasmus Rask (Rask, Rasmus) had developed a rigorous science of “comparative philology,” and a new era of dictionary making was called for. Even as early as 1812, Franz Passow had published an essay in which he set forth the canons of a new lexicography, stressing the importance of the use of quotations arranged chronologically in order to exhibit the history of each word. The Brothers Grimm (Grimm, Brothers), Jacob and Wilhelm, developed these theories in their preparations for the Deutsches Wörterbuch in 1838. The first part of it was printed in 1852, but the end was not reached until more than a century later, in 1960. French scholarship was worthily represented by Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré (Littré, Paul-Émile), who began working on his Dictionnaire de la langue française in 1844, but, with interruptions of the Revolutions of 1848 (1848, Revolutions of) and his philosophical studies, he did not complete it until 1873.

      Among British scholars the historical outlook took an important step forward in 1808 in the work of John Jamieson on the language of Scotland (Scots Gaelic language). Because he did not need to consider the “classical purity” of the language, he included quotations of humble origin; in his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, his use of “mean” sources marked a turning point in the history of lexicography. Even as late as 1835 the critic Richard Garnett said that “the only good English dictionary we possess is Dr. Jamieson’s Scottish one.” Another collector, James Jermyn, showed by his publications between 1815 and 1848 that he had the largest body of quotations assembled before that of The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford English Dictionary, The). Charles Richardson was also an industrious collector, presenting his dictionary, from 1818 on, distributed alphabetically throughout the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (vol. 14 to 25) and then reissued as a separate work in 1835–37. Richardson was a disciple of the benighted John Horne Tooke (Tooke, John Horne), whose 18th-century theories long held back the development of philology in England. Richardson excoriated Noah Webster for ignoring “the learned elders of lexicography” such as John Minsheu (whose Guide into the Tongues appeared in 1617), Gerhard Johannes Vossius (Vossius, Gerardus Johannes) (who published his Etymologicum linguae Latinae (Latin language) in 1662), and Franciscus Junius (Etymologicum Anglicanum, written before 1677). Richardson did collect a rich body of illustrative quotations, sometimes letting them show the meaning without a definition, but his work was largely a monument of misguided industry that met with the neglect it deserved.

      Scholars more and more felt the need for a full historical dictionary that would display the English language in accordance with the most rigorous scientific principles of lexicography. The Philological Society, founded in 1842, established an “Unregistered Words Committee,” but, upon hearing two papers by Richard Chenevix Trench in 1857—“On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries”—the society changed its plan to the making of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, A). Forward steps were taken under two editors, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick James Furnivall (Furnivall, Frederick James), until, in 1879, James Augustus Henry Murray (Murray, Sir James), a Scot known for his brilliance in philology, was engaged as editor. A small army of voluntary readers were inspirited to contribute quotation slips, which reached the number of 5,000,000 in 1898, and no doubt 1,000,000 were added after that. Only 1,827,306 of them were used in print. The copy started going to the printer in 1882; Part I was finished in 1884. Later, three other editors were added, each editing independently with his own staff—Henry Bradley, from the north of England, in 1888, William Alexander Craigie (Craigie, Sir William Alexander), another Scot, in 1901, and Charles Talbut Onions, the only “Southerner,” in 1914. So painstaking was the work that it was not finished until 1928, in more than 15,500 pages with three long columns each. An extraordinary high standard was maintained throughout. The work was reprinted, with a supplement, in 12 volumes in 1933 with the title The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford English Dictionary, The), and as the OED it has been known ever since. In 1989 a second edition, known as the OED2, was published in 20 volumes.

      In the United States, lexicographical activity has been unceasing since 1828. In the middle years of the 19th century, a “war of the dictionaries” was carried on between the supporters of Webster and those of his rival, Joseph Emerson Worcester (Worcester, Joseph Emerson). To a large extent this was a competition between publishers who wished to preempt the market in the lower schools, but literary people took sides on the basis of other issues. In particular, the contentious Webster had gained a reputation as a reformer of spelling and a champion of American innovations while the quiet Worcester followed traditions.

      In 1846 Worcester brought out an important new work, A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language, which included many neologisms of the time, and in the next year Webster’s son-in-law, Chauncey Allen Goodrich, edited an improved American Dictionary of the deceased Webster. In this edition the Webster interests were taken over by an aggressive publishing firm, the G. & C. Merriam (Merriam-Webster dictionary) Co. (See Merriam-Webster dictionary.) Their agents were very active in the “war of the dictionaries” and sometimes secured an order, by decree of a state legislature, for their book to be placed in every schoolhouse of the state. Worcester’s climactic edition of 1860, A Dictionary of the English Language, gave him the edge in the “war,” and the poet and critic James Russell Lowell (Lowell, James Russell) declared: “From this long conflict Dr. Worcester has unquestionably come off victorious.” The Merriams, however, brought out their answer in 1864, popularly called “the unabridged,” with etymologies supplied by a famous German scholar, Karl August Friedrich Mahn. Thereafter, the Worcester series received no major reediting, and its faltering publishers allowed it to pass into history.

      One of the best English dictionaries ever compiled was issued in 24 parts from 1889 to 1891 as The Century Dictionary (Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia), edited by William Dwight Whitney (Whitney, William Dwight). It contained much encyclopaedic material but bears comparison even with the OED. Isaac Kauffman Funk (Funk, Isaac Kauffman), in 1893, brought out A Standard Dictionary of the English Language, its chief innovation being the giving of definitions in the order of their importance, not the historical order.

Thus, at the turn of the new century, the United States had four reputable dictionaries—Webster’s, Worcester’s (already becoming moribund), the Century, and Funk’s Standard (see Funk & Wagnalls Dictionaries (Funk & Wagnalls dictionaries)). England was also well served by many (the original dates given here), including John Ogilvie (1850), P. Austin Nuttall (1855), Robert Gordon Latham (1866, reediting Todd’s Johnson of 1818), Robert Hunter (1879), and Charles Annandale (1882).

Kinds of dictionaries

General-purpose dictionaries

      Although one may speak of a “general-purpose” dictionary, it must be realized that every dictionary is compiled with a particular set of users in mind. In turn, the public has come to expect certain conventional features (see below Features and problems (dictionary)), and a publisher departs from the conventions at his peril. One of the chief demands is that a dictionary should be “authoritative,” but the word authoritative is ambiguous. It can refer to the quality of scholarship and the employment of the soundest information available, or it can describe a prescriptive demand for compliance to particular standards. Many people ask for arbitrary decisions in usage choices, but most linguists feel that, when a dictionary goes beyond its function of recording accurate information on the state of the language, it becomes a bad dictionary.

Most people know dictionaries in the abridged sizes, commonly called “desk” or “college-size” dictionaries. Such abridgments date to the 18th century. Their form had become stultified until, in the 1930s, Edward L. Thorndike (Thorndike, Edward L.) produced a series for schools (Beginning, Junior, and Senior). His dictionaries were not “museums” but tools that encouraged schoolchildren to learn about language. He drew upon his word counts and his “semantic counts” to determine inclusions. The new mode was carried on to the college level by Clarence L. Barnhart in The American College Dictionary (ACD), in 1947. (Barnhart also carried on Thorndike’s work in the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionaries (Thorndike–Barnhart dictionaries) after Thorndike’s death.) After mid-century, other college-size works were revised to meet that competition: the Merriam-Webster Seventh New Collegiate (1963), the Standard College Dictionary (1963), and Webster’s New World Dictionary (1953; 2nd ed. 1970). An especially valuable addition was The Random House Dictionary (1966), edited by Jess Stein in a middle size called “the unabridged” and by Laurence Urdang in a smaller size (1968). The Merriam-Webster Collegiate series was subsequently extended to 9th (1983), 10th (1993), and 11th (2003) editions. (The G. & C. Merriam Co. [now Merriam-Webster, Incorporated] was acquired by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., in 1964.)

      The Merriam-Webster New International of 1909 had a serene, uncluttered air. The second edition, completely reedited, appeared in 1934, and it, in turn, was superseded in 1961 by the Third New International, edited by Philip Babcock Gove. At its first publication it stood alone among American dictionaries in giving a full report on the lexicon of present-day English. (Because it, together with its supplements, is now available online, it is regularly updated.) The prepublication publicity emphasized quotations from writers dismissed as ephemeral, such as Polly Adler, Ethel Merman (Merman, Ethel), and Mickey Spillane (Spillane, Mickey), as well as the dictionary’s statement about ain’t as “used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers.” Such publicity aroused a storm of denunciation in newspapers and magazines by writers who, others asserted, revealed a shocking ignorance of the nature of language. The comments were collected in a “casebook” titled Dictionaries and That Dictionary, edited by James H. Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt (1962).

      In 1969 came The American Heritage Dictionary, edited by William Morris, who was known for his valuable small dictionary Words (1947). The American Heritage was designed to take advantage of the reaction against the Merriam-Webster Third. A “usage panel” of 104 members, chosen mostly from the conservative “literary establishment,” provided material for a set of “usage notes.” Their pronouncements, found by scholars to be inconsistent, were intended to provide “the essential dimension of guidance,” as the editor put it, “in these permissive times.” The etymological material was superior to that in comparable dictionaries.

      In England, Henry Cecil Wyld produced his Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1932), admirable in every way except for its social class elitism. The smaller-sized dictionaries of the Oxford University Press deserved their wide circulation.

Scholarly dictionaries

      Beyond the dictionaries intended for practical use by the general public are the scholarly dictionaries, with the scientific goal of completeness and rigour in their chosen area. Probably the most scholarly dictionary in the world is the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, edited in Germany and Austria. Its main collections were made from 1883 to 1900, when publication began, but by the turn of the 21st century its publication had reached only the letter P. A number of countries have had “national dictionaries” under way—projects that often take many decades. Two have already been mentioned—the Grimm dictionary for German (a revised and expanded edition begun in 1965) and the Littré for French (reedited 1956–58). In addition, there are the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal (1882–1998) for Dutch; the Ordbok öfver svenska språket (begun 1898) for Swedish; the Slovar sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo yazyka (1950–65; “Dictionary of Modern Literary Russian”); the Norsk Ordbok (begun 1966), for Norwegian; and the Ordbog for det danske Sprog (1995) for Danish. Of outstanding scholarship are An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles (begun 1976) prepared at Pune (Poona), India, and The Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (begun 1959), in progress in Jerusalem. The most ambitious project of all is the Trésor de la langue française (Tresor de la langue française). In the 1960s more than 250 million word examples were collected, and publication began in 1971, but after two volumes the scope of the work was scaled back from 60 (planned) volumes to 16.

      The Oxford English Dictionary remains the supreme completed achievement in all lexicography. After completion of the first edition in 1928, the remaining quotations, both used and unused, were divided up for use in a set of “period dictionaries.” The prime mover of this plan, Sir William Craigie (Craigie, Sir William Alexander), undertook A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue himself, covering the period from the 14th to the 17th century in Scottish (Scots Gaelic language) speech. Enough material was amassed under his direction so that editing could begin in 1925 (publication, however, did not begin until 1931), and before his death in 1957 he arranged that it should be carried on at the University of Edinburgh. It was completed in 2003. The work on the older period spurred the establishment of a project on the modern Scots language, which got under way in 1925, called The Scottish National Dictionary (published 1931–76), giving historical quotations after the year 1700.

      In the mainstream of English, a period dictionary for Old English (Old English language) (before 1100) was planned for many decades by a dictionary committee of the Modern Language Association of America (Old English section), and finally in the late 1960s it got under way at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. The Dictionary of Old English is based on a combining of computerized concordances of bodies of Old English literature. A Middle English Dictionary, covering the period 1100 to 1475, was completed in 2001, with an overwhelming fullness of detail. For the period 1475 to 1700, an Early Modern English Dictionary did not fare as well. It got under way in 1928 at the University of Michigan, and more than three million quotation slips were amassed, but the work could not be continued in the decade of the Great Depression, and only in the mid-1960s was it revived. The OED supplement of 1933 was itself supplemented in 4 volumes (1972–86). A second edition of the OED was published in 20 volumes in 1989, an expanded integration of the original 12-volume set and the 4-volume set into one sequence. In 1992 the second edition was released on CD-ROM. Three supplementary volumes were published in print in 1993 and 1997, and an online version was launched in 2000.

      Craigie, in 1925, proposed a dictionary of American English. Support was found for the project, and he transferred from Oxford University to the University of Chicago in order to become its editor. The aim of the work, he wrote, was that of “exhibiting clearly those features by which the English of the American colonies and the United States is distinguished from that of England and the rest of the English-speaking world.” Thus, not only specific Americanisms were dealt with but words that were important in the natural history and cultural history of the New World. After a 10-year period of collecting, publication began in 1936 under the title A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, A), and the 20 parts (four volumes) were completed in 1944. This was followed in 1951 by a work that limited itself to Americanisms only—A Dictionary of Americanisms (Dictionary of Americanisms, A), edited by Mitford M. Mathews.

      The English language, as it has spread widely over the world, has come to consist of a group of coordinate branches, each expressing the needs of its speakers in communication; further scholarly dictionaries are needed to record the particular characteristics of and influences on each branch. Both Canada and Jamaica were treated in 1967—A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, Walter Spencer Avis, editor in chief, and Dictionary of Jamaican English, edited by Frederic G. Cassidy and R.B. LePage. In 1978 a historical dictionary of South African English (fourth edition 1991), edited by Jean Branford, was issued. The first edition of Australia’s national dictionary, The Macquarie Dictionary, was published in 1981; its third edition, issued in 1997, included for the first time illustrative sentences from Australian literature. The Dictionary of New Zealand English was published in 1997. Such dictionaries are valuable in displaying the intimate interrelations of the language to the culture of which it is a part.

Specialized dictionaries

      Specialized dictionaries are overwhelming in their variety and their diversity. Each area of lexical study, such as etymology, pronunciation, and usage, can have a dictionary of its own. The earliest important dictionary of etymology for English was Stephen Skinner’s Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae of 1671, in Latin, with a strong bias for finding a Classical origin for every English word. In the 18th century, a number of dictionaries were published that traced most English words to Celtic sources, because the authors did not realize that the words had been borrowed into Celtic rather than the other way around. With the rise of a soundly based philology by the middle of the 19th century, a scientific etymological dictionary could be compiled, and this was provided in 1879 by Walter William Skeat (Skeat, Walter William). It was long kept in print in reeditions but was superseded in 1966 by The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, by Charles Talbut Onions, who had worked many decades on it until his death. Valuable in its particular restricted area is J.F. Bense’s Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary (1926–39).

      Two works are especially useful in showing the relation between languages descended from the ancestral Indo-European (Indo-European languages) language—Carl Darling Buck’s Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (1949) and Julius Pokorny (Pokorny, Julius)’s Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (1959). The Indo-European roots are well displayed in the summary by Calvert Watkins, published as an appendix to The American Heritage Dictionary. Interrelations are also dealt with by Eric Partridge (Partridge, Eric) in his Origins (1958).

      During the 20th century the pronouncing dictionary, a type handed down from the 18th century, was best known by two examples, one in England and one in America. That of Daniel Jones, An English Pronouncing Dictionary, claimed to represent that “most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk have been educated at the great public boarding-schools.” Although he called this the Received Pronunciation (RP), he had no intention of imposing it on the English-speaking world. It originally appeared in 1917 and was repeatedly revised during the author’s long life. Also strictly descriptive was a similar American work by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott, A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, published in 1944 and never revised but still valuable for its record of the practices of its time.

      The “conceptual dictionary,” in which words are arranged in groups by their meaning, had its first important exponent in Bishop John Wilkins, whose Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language was published in 1668. A plan of this sort was carried out by Peter Mark Roget (Roget, Peter Mark) with his Thesaurus, published in 1852 and many times reprinted and reedited. Although philosophically oriented, Roget’s work has served the practical purpose of another genre, the dictionary of synonyms.

      The dictionaries of usage record information about the choices that a speaker must make among rival forms. In origin, they developed from the lists of errors that were popular in the 18th century. Many of them are still strongly puristic in tendency, supporting the urge for “standardizing” the language. The work with the most loyal following is H.W. Fowler (Fowler, H W)’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), ably reedited in 1965 by Sir Ernest Gowers. It represents the good taste of a sensitive, urbane litterateur. It has many devotees in the United States and also a number of competitors. Among the latter, the most competently done is A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957), by Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans. Usually the dictionaries of usage have reflected the idiosyncrasies of the compilers, but from the 1920s to the 1960s a body of studies by scholars emphasized an objective survey of what is in actual use. These were drawn upon by Margaret M. Bryant for her book Current American Usage (1962). A small corner of the field of usage is dealt with by Eric Partridge (Partridge, Eric) in A Dictionary of Clichés (1940).

      The regional variation of language has yielded dialect dictionaries in all the major languages of the world. In England, after John Ray’s issuance of his first glossary of dialect words in 1674, much collecting was done, especially in the 19th century under the auspices of the English Dialect Society. This collecting culminated in the splendid English Dialect Dictionary of Joseph Wright in six volumes (1898–1905). American regional speech was collected from 1774 onward; John Pickering first put a glossary of Americanisms into a separate book in 1816. The American Dialect Society, founded in 1889, made extensive collections, with plans for a dictionary, but this came to fruition only in 1965, when Frederic G. Cassidy embarked on A Dictionary of American Regional English (known as DARE).

      The many “functional varieties” of English also have their dictionaries. slang and cant in particular have been collected in England since 1565, but the first important work was published in 1785, by Capt. Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, reflecting well the low life of the 18th century. In 1859 John Camden Hotten published the 19th-century material, but a full, historical, scholarly survey was presented by John Stephen Farmer and W.E. Henley in their Slang and Its Analogues, in seven volumes, 1890–1904, with a revised first volume in 1909. For the 20th century the dictionaries of Eric Partridge are valuable. Slang in the United States is so rich and varied that collectors have as yet only scratched the surface, but the work by Harold Wentworth and Stuart B. Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (1960), can be consulted. The argot of the underworld has been treated in many studies by David W. Maurer.

      Of all specialized dictionaries, the bilingual group are the most serviceable and frequently used. With the rise of the vernacular languages during the Renaissance, translating to and from Latin had great importance. The Welshman in England was provided with a bilingual dictionary as early as 1547, by William Salesbury. Scholars in their analyses of language, as well as practical people for everyday needs, are anxious to have bilingual dictionaries. Even the most exotic and remote languages have been tackled, often by religious missionaries with the motive of translating the Bible.

      Dictionaries dealing with special areas of vocabulary are so overwhelming in number that they can merely be alluded to here. In English, the earliest was a glossary of law terms published in 1527 by John Rastell. His purpose, he said, was “to expound certain obscure and dark terms concerning the laws of this realm.” The dictionaries of technical terms in many fields often have the purpose of standardizing the terminology; this normative aim is especially important in newly developing countries where the language has not yet become accommodated to modern technological needs. In some fields, such as philosophy, religion, or linguistics, the terminology is closely tied to a particular school of thought or the individual system of one writer, and, consequently, a lexicographer is obliged to say “according to Kant,” “in the usage of Christian Science,” “as used by Bloomfield,” and so on.

Features and problems

Establishment of the word list

      The goal of the big dictionaries is to make a complete inventory of a language, recording every word that can be found. The obsolete and archaic words must be included from the earlier stages of the language and even the words attested to only once (nonce words (nonce word)). In a language with a large literature, many “uncollected words” are likely to remain, lurking in out-of-the-way sources. The OED caught many personal coinages, but not head-over-heelishness (1882), odditude (1860), pigstyosity (1869), whitechokerism (1866), and other graceless jocularities. Also, the so-called latent words are a problem, when a lexicographer knows that a derivative word probably has been used, but he has no evidence for it. The first edition of the OED had three quotations for kindheartedness but none for kindheartedly, which any speaker of English would feel free to use. Some “ghost words” have arisen from the misreading of manuscripts and from misprints, and the lexicographer attempts to cast these out.

      Various large blocks of words have a questionable status. Both geographic names and biographical entries are selectively included in some dictionaries but are really encyclopaedic. More than one million insects have been identified and named by entomologists, while names of chemical compounds and drugs may be as numerous. Trade names and proprietary names may number in the hundreds of thousands. Vogue suffixes such as -ism, -ology, -scope, or -wise are used by some with the freedom of a grammatical construction. These millions are beyond what any dictionary can be expected to include.

      For the smaller-sized dictionaries, the editors attempt to choose the words that are likely to be looked up. They comb the scholarly works carefully and supplement them from files that they may have collected. They may decide to put derivative words at the end of entries as “run-ons” or to have all words strictly as separate alphabetical entries. A print dictionary’s size is ultimately decided by the commercial consideration of how much can be put into a work that can be sold for a reasonable price and held readily in the hand. (Bulk also influences the size of the word list for unabridged dictionaries.)

      The establishment of a word list involves many difficult technical problems. Linguists tend to use the terms morpheme, free form, bound form, lexeme, and so on, inasmuch as word is a popular term not suited to technical use. A safe compromise is to use lexical unit. This term allows the inclusion of set phrases (established groups) and idioms. Words having different etymological sources must be considered as different words. Thus calf in the sense of the young of a bovine animal came from Common Germanic, whereas calf for the fleshy back of the lower part of the leg came from Old Norse, perhaps from a Celtic source. A more difficult problem is found when a word entered the language at different points—such as cookie, from the Dutch koekje (“little cake”), recorded in Scottish in 1701 in the form cuckie, then independently taken from the Dutch of New York’s Hudson River valley in the form cockie in 1703, and perhaps independently taken into South African English from Afrikaans in the mid-19th century.

Spelling

      Dictionaries have probably played an important role in establishing the conventions of English spelling. Johnson has received much credit for this, though he differed very little from his predecessors. He used the spelling smoak in the early part of his dictionary, but when he came to the entry itself he changed it to smoke, and this has prevailed. Noah Webster (Webster, Noah) introduced some simplifications that have become accepted in American English. American dictionaries usually label the distinctive British spellings, such as centre and its class, honour and its class, connexion, gaol, kerb, tyre, waggon, and a few others.

      The desire for uniformity is so great that popular variants are not welcomed; the very common alright is not yet entirely approved, nor is the widespread variant miniscule for minuscule. The OED is exceptional in listing the early variant spellings, showing that a common word like good has been spelled in more than a dozen different ways, with many more from Scottish usage. When the spelling reform movement was at its height, from the 1880s to c. 1910, the dictionaries included the new forms, but by the later 20th century those had been expunged. The graphic dress of the language is now so sacrosanct that dictionaries are used as authoritarian “style manuals” in matters of spelling, hyphenation, and syllabification.

Pronunciation

      Dictionaries are more responsive to usage in the matter of pronunciation than they are in spelling. It is claimed that in the 19th century the Merriam-Webster dictionaries foisted a New England pronunciation on the United States, but by the mid-20th century many regional variations had been recorded. Webster’s Third New International went to surprising lengths in its variants; perhaps its record is in giving 132 different ways of pronouncing a fortiori.

      The former practice of giving pronunciations as if the words were pronounced in isolation in a formal manner represented an artificiality that distorted language in use; dictionaries today mark pronunciation as it appears in continuous discourse. Furthermore, there has been a trend toward what has been called “democratization.” In the word government, for instance, it is recognized that many people do not pronounce an n, and some people actually say something like “gubb-munt.” There is a constant battle between traditional spoken forms and spelling pronunciations.

      Since the alphabet is notoriously inadequate for recording the sounds of English, dictionaries are forced to adopt additional symbols. A system of using numerals over vowels was handed down from the 18th century, but that gave way to the diacritic markings of the Merriam-Webster series. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has offered another possibility, but the general public finds it abstruse. Even more detailed symbols are needed in linguistic atlases and phonetic (phonetics) research. With considerable courage, Clarence L. Barnhart introduced the symbol schwa (ə) into The American College Dictionary (1947) for the neutral midcentral vowel, as at the beginning and end of America, and the symbol has now become widely accepted. Although some systems are clumsier than others, the key does not matter much if it is applied consistently.

      The supplying of etymologies involves such difficult decisions for a lexicographer as whether words should be carried back into prehistory by means of reconstructed forms or the degree to which speculation should be permitted. An American Romance scholar, Yakov Malkiel, presented the notion that words follow “trajectories”—by finding certain points in the history of a word, one can link up the developments in form and meaning. The austere treatment of some words consists in saying “derivation unknown,” and yet this sometimes causes interesting possibilities to be ignored.

      A fundamental distinction is made in word history between the “native stock” and the “loanwords.” There have been so many borrowings into English that the language has been called “hypertrophied.” The traditional view is to regard the borrowings as a source of “richness.” A historical dictionary does its best to ascertain the date at which a word was adopted from another language, but the word may have to go through a period of probation. Murray (Murray, Sir James), the editor of the OED, listed four stages of word “citizenship”: the casual, the alien, the denizen, and the natural. The casuals may not be part of the language, as they appear only in travel writings and accounts of foreign countries, but a lexicographer must collect citations for them in order to record the early history of a word that may later become naturalized. Some words may remain denizens for centuries, Murray pointed out, such as phenomenon treated as Greek, genus as Latin, and aide-de-camp as French. When a word is borrowed, its etymology may be traced through its descent in its original language.

      Some early philosophies assumed that there is a mystic relation between the present use of a word and its origin and that etymology is a search for the “true meaning.” The recognition of continuous linguistic change establishes, however, that etymology is no more than early history, sometimes as reconstructed on the basis of relationships and known sound changes. Ingenuity in etymologizing is dangerous, and even plausibility can be misleading, but ascertained fact has overriding importance. It is curious that contemporary slang is often more uncertain in its origin than words of long history.

Grammatical information (grammar)

      Dictionaries are obliged to contain the two basic types of words of a language—the “function words” (those that perform the grammatical functions in a language, such as the articles, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions) and the “referential words” (those that symbolize entities outside the language system). Each type must be treated in a suitable way. Dictionaries have been much criticized for not including a sufficiency of grammatical information. It is usual to mark the part of speech, but not the categories of mass noun and count noun. (A mass noun, such as milk or oxygen, cannot ordinarily be used in the plural, while a count noun is any noun that can be pluralized.) Such information is given in some dictionaries designed for teaching, and the technique could well be adopted more generally. The irregular inflections must be given, showing that one says goose, geese, but not moose, meese. Or in the verbs, one says walk, walked, but ride, rode. It is usual to treat the different parts of speech as separate lexical entries, as in “to walk” and “to take a walk,” requiring a parallel list of senses, but Thorndike, in his school dictionaries, experimented with grouping the parts of speech together when they had a similar sense.

      The relation of grammar to the vocabulary is the subject of considerable controversy among linguists. If one considers the analysis of language as one unified enterprise, then the grammar is central and the lexical units are inserted at some point in the analysis. Another view is that the division is into coordinate branches, such as phonology, syntax, and lexicon. Certainly lexicographers try to take advantage of all findings made by grammarians.

Sense division and definition

      A language like English has so many complex developments in the senses—i.e., the particular meanings—of its words that the task of the lexicographer is difficult. It is generally accepted that “meaning” is a suffusing characteristic of all language by definition, and the attempt to slice meaning into “senses” must be done arbitrarily by the person analyzing the language. This is where collected contexts form the basis of the lexicographer’s judgment. The lexicographer sorts the quotations into piles on the basis of similarities and differences and may have to discard “transitional” examples. Figurative developments, such as the mouth of a river or the foot of a hill, make complications in the relationships.

      For the order in which the senses of words are given, the order of historical development has been chiefly used. For an old word like earth, the information may be insufficient. The editors of the OED had to give up, because, they said, “men’s notions of the shape and position of the earth have so greatly changed since Old Teutonic times”; they were obliged to compromise with a logical order. Sometimes, but not always, a word seems to have a “core,” or central, meaning from which other meanings develop. If the historical order is followed, the obsolete and archaic meanings may have to appear first. Therefore, some popular dictionaries give the most important meaning first and work down to the rare and occasional meanings at the end. The so-called “semantic count,” giving senses in order of frequency, has also been used.

      There seems to be no one method that is best for defining all words. The lexicographer must use artistry in selecting the ways that will convey a sense accurately and succinctly. The lexicographer attempts to find what is “criterial” in a particular meaning but can also give further detail until an entry runs into the area of the encyclopaedic.

      In logical theory it would be ideal to have a “ metalanguage” in which definitions could be stated, but nothing of the sort is available for popular use. A “defining vocabulary” can be established, and in school dictionaries the definitions use simple words. In the last analysis all definitions have to fall back on undefined terms (to be accepted like axioms) that symbolize first-order experience of life. In this connection the logician Willard Van Orman Quine (Quine, Willard Van Orman) argued that lexicography is basically concerned with synonymy.

Usage labels

      Part of the information that a dictionary should give concerns the restrictions and constraints on the use of words, commonly called usage labelling. There is great variation in language use in many dimensions—temporal, geographical, and cultural. The people who make a two-part division into “correct” and “incorrect” show that they do not understand how language works. The valuation does not lie in the word itself but in the appropriateness of the context. Therefore, it is preferable to be sparing in the use of labels and to allow the tone to become apparent from the illustrative examples. An important distinction was put forward in 1948 by an American philologist, John S. Kenyon, when he discriminated between “cultural levels,” which refer to the degree of education and cultivation of a person, and “functional varieties,” which refer to the styles of speech suitable to particular situations. Thus, a cultivated person rightly uses informal or colloquial language when at ease with friends.

      A lexicographer is faced with the difficult task of selecting a suitable set of labels. In the temporal categories, labels such as obsolete, obsolescent, archaic, and old-fashioned are dangerous because some speakers have long memories and might use old words very naturally. National labels are problematical because words move easily from one branch of the language to another. The word blizzard, for instance, is no doubt an Americanism in origin, but since the 1880s it has been so well known over the English-speaking world that a national label would be misleading. The label dialect or regional, either for England or America, offers many problems, for alleged “boundaries” are permeable. The label colloquial was much misunderstood, and now informal is often used in its place. There may be a “poetic vocabulary” that needs labeling, and few people will agree on any definition of slang.

      It is revealing that under the word cockeyed, marked slang, in early printings of the Merriam-Webster Third New International, one of the quotations is by the careful stylist Jacques Barzun (Barzun, Jacques); in order to use effective English, this cultivated writer is willing to draw upon slang. Some would argue that, in marking the use as slang, the Merriam-Webster staff was not sufficiently “permissive.”

      Some dictionaries wisely include special paragraphs on the constraints of usage, sometimes as a “synonymy” and sometimes as a “usage note.”

Illustrative quotations

      Dictionaries of the past have copied shamelessly from one to another, but the collecting of a file of illustrative quotations makes possible a fresh, original treatment. Scholarly works such as the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, The) and its supplements follow the canon of always using the earliest quotation and the latest for an obsolete word; in between, the quotations are selected for revealing facets of usage or for “forcing” a meaning. The criterion of use by only the best writers does not hold for a truly historical dictionary, because a “low” source may be especially revealing. The giving of exact source citations is not a matter of pedantry but establishes the scientific basis by which others can check the evidence. A different set of quotations, accurately attested, might have led to a different treatment. Thus, the phrase illustrative quotation is something of a misnomer, for the quotations are more than illustrative; they form the basic evidence from which conclusions are drawn. It is the work of the editor to decide when the collections are sufficient—ripe, as it were—to move from the collecting stage to the editing stage.

      A small-sized dictionary may advantageously use made-up sentences, because an aptly framed “forcing” context can tell more than a definition. In fact, the habitual collocations of a word (the surrounding words with which it usually appears) may be revealing of the nature of a word, and during the second half of the 20th century the compilation of “dictionaries of collocations” represented a new direction in lexicography.

Technological aids

      The development of machine aids, such as the computer, during the 20th century was heralded by some as ushering in a new era in lexicography. Although a computer can do well in many tasks of great drudgery that are involved in building a dictionary—mechanical excerpting of texts, alphabetizing, and classifying by designated descriptors—it is limited to what a human being tells it to do. It is difficult for a computer to sort out homographs (i.e., separate words that are spelled alike); at the editing stage, the delicate decisions must be humanly made. A computer can be used to good advantage in the compilation of concordances of individual authors or of limited texts, and then one type of dictionary could be made by a summation of concordances. Such a procedure, with a large body of literature such as that of the Renaissance, is especially advantageous because an editor would be overwhelmed working alone without any technological assistance.

Attitudes of society

      Without a doubt, dictionaries have been a conservative force for many hundreds of years, not only in countries that have had an official academy that has the national language as part of its province but also in the English-speaking countries, in which academies have been spurned. Well-entrenched popular attitudes account for this. A Neoplatonic outlook assumes that there exists an ideal form of language from which faltering human beings have departed and that dictionaries might bring people closer to the perfect language. Also, there is a widespread “yearning for certainty,” a seeking for guidance amid the wilderness of possible forms. Thus, people welcome self-proclaimed “supreme authorities.”

      Americans have had additional reasons for their homage to the dictionary. In colonial times Americans felt themselves to be far from the centre of civilization and were willing to accept a book standard in order to learn what they thought prevailed in England. This linguistic colonialism lasted a long time and set the pattern of accepting the dictionary as law. In 1869 the scholar Richard Grant White declared: “Upon the proper spelling, pronunciation, etymology, and definition of words, a dictionary might be made to which high and almost absolute authority might justly be awarded.” In this vein teachers have taken pains to inculcate “the dictionary habit” in their pupils. Rather than observe the language around them, Americans encouraged in this habit tend to fly to a dictionary to settle questions on language. This call for dogmatic prescription has been a source of uneasiness to lexicographers, most of whom now argue that all they can do legitimately is describe how the language has been used.

      Social attitudes have affected the dictionaries also in the enforcement of certain taboos. Certain words commonly called obscene have been omitted, and, thus, irrational taboos have been strengthened. A perennial problem in lexicography is the treatment of the terms of ethnic insult. There is constant social pressure for leaving them out, and some dictionaries have succumbed to it, but it may be that an enlightened attitude shows that the open discussion of prejudices is the best way of getting rid of them.

      The greatest value of a dictionary is in giving access to the full resources of a language and as a source of information that will enhance free enjoyment of the mother tongue.

Major dictionaries

      For the English language the supreme achievement represented by the OED should be emphasized again. Major 20th-century dictionaries in some other languages are discussed below.

      For the French language the eighth edition (1931–35) of the French Academy’s dictionary manifests conservative views about the vocabulary, but three other works from the second half of the century proved more serviceable—the Petit Larousse: dictionnaire encyclopédique pour tous (1959); an edition of the famous Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (1974); and Paul Robert’s Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (French language) (1960–64). For French etymology alone, the standard work was long Walther von Wartburg’s Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch.

      Among other Romance tongues, Italian (Italian language) had many dictionaries during the 20th century. The Crusca Academy of Florence furnished its Vocabolario in a first edition in 1612, but the edition begun in 1863 bogged down at the letter O in 1923. There was also the dictionary by G. Devoto and G.C. Oli, Dizionario della lingua italiana (1971). Following the model of the OED was the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (begun 1961), edited by Salvatore Battaglia. Very serviceable to English speakers is the Italian Dictionary of Alfred Hoare (1915) and that of Barbara Reynolds (1962–81). For Spanish (Spanish language), the Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid continued to produce useful dictionaries.

      For the German language the great dictionary begun by the Brothers Grimm (Deutsches Wörterbuch), completed in 1960, was reedited in a project that took many years, and it appeared online in 2003. A standard work was Hermann Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, which first appeared in 1897 but was later reissued in several editions. In addition to the national dictionaries in the Scandinavian countries mentioned above, another work done with special scholarly skill is noteworthy: Einar Haugen, editor in chief, Norwegian English Dictionary (Madison, Wisconsin [Oslo-printed], 1965), dealing with the two official languages of Norway, Bokmål and Nynorsk. The Afrikaans (Afrikaans language) language was the subject of several dictionaries. Publication of Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal began at Pretoria in 1950 as a collaboration of the best scholars in South Africa. A full dictionary of Yiddish (Yiddish literature) was not written during the 20th century, but one scholarly source was Uriel Weinreich’s Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary (1968).

      Greek (Greek language) lexicography offers special difficulties because of the long range of illustrious literature that must be covered and the split in recent centuries between Katharevusa (Katharevusa Greek language), the literary language, and Demotic (Demotic Greek language), the language of everyday life. For the English-speaking world the standard work for Ancient Greek was by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, published in a first edition in 1843. For Russian (Russian language) the Soviet Academy of Arts produced a useful work in four volumes (1957–61). Many linguists have attempted to cover Arabic (Arabic language); for long the most useful work was that of Hans Wehr, as translated and edited by J. Milton Cowan, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1961). For Japanese (Japanese language) the standard source was the Dai-jiten (“Great Dictionary”), issued at Tokyo in 26 volumes (1934–36). One of the best-known Chinese (Chinese languages) dictionaries, Ci hai (Tz’u hai), was revised in 1969 and published in Taiwan; a version in simplified characters was also published in mainland China.

Allen Walker Read Ed.

Additional Reading

General works

Walford’s Guide to Reference Material, 5th ed., vol. 3 (1991); and Eugene P. Sheehy et al. (eds.), Guide to Reference Books, 10th ed. (1986), and their supplements, both provide histories and scholarly evaluations of the principal current English- and foreign-language dictionaries. American Reference Books Annual, available in print and online, is a reviewing service for reference books published in the United States that regularly includes overviews of dictionaries. Frances Neel Cheney and Wiley J. Williams, Fundamental Reference Sources, 2nd ed. (1980), includes discussions of good dictionaries. Annie M. Brewer, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Other Word-Related Books, 4th ed., 2 vol. (1988), is a classified catalog of about 38,000 dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and similar works in English and all other languages. Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning, and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Computer (1986), is a readable history of reference book publishing. James Rettig (ed.), Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing (1992), contains essays on the history and use of 32 reference books.

History and philosophy

Historical and critical notes on English- and foreign-language works are provided in the following bibliographies: Robert L. Collison, Dictionaries of English and Foreign Languages, 2nd ed. (1971): A.J. Walford and J.E.O. Screen (eds.), A Guide to Foreign Language Courses and Dictionaries, 3rd ed., rev. and enlarged (1977); Library of Congress, General Reference and Bibliography Division, Foreign Language–English Dictionaries, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1955); and Helga Lengenfelder (ed.), International Bibliography of Specialized Dictionaries, 6th ed. (1979). The history of Classical dictionaries receives an extended treatment in John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 1 (1903, reissued 1967). DeWitt T. Starnes, Renaissance Dictionaries: English-Latin and Latin-English (1954), is an excellent scholarly survey.Surveys of English-language dictionaries include James A.H. Murray, The Evolution of English Lexicography (1900, reprinted 1970); Jürgen Schäfer, Early Modern English Lexicography, 2 vol. (1989), which comprises a survey of the period 1475–1640 (vol. 1), and additions and corrections to the Oxford English Dictionary (vol. 2); M.M. Mathews, A Survey of English Dictionaries (1933, reissued 1966), from the earliest times to the 19th century; James Root Hulbert, Dictionaries: British and American, rev. ed. (1968), which includes material on etymology and slang; and DeWitt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604–1755 (1946, reissued 1991). Samuel Johnson’s work is specifically studied in James H. Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book (1955, reprinted 1974); and Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–1773 (1990). The history of the Oxford English Dictionary is traced in K.M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977, reprinted 2001), by Murray’s granddaughter; Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998); “The History of the Oxford English Dictionary,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (1989), pp. xxxv–lvi; and Robert W. Burchfield and Hans Aarsleff, The Oxford English Dictionary and the State of the Language (1988). American dictionaries in particular are noted in Joseph H. Friend, The Development of American Lexicography, 1798–1864 (1967); and Eva Mae Burkett, American Dictionaries of the English Language Before 1861 (1979), covering the same period. The documents on the controversy over the Merriam-Webster Third New International Dictionary are collected by James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt, Dictionaries and That Dictionary (1962).Discussions of the technical problems arising in lexicography include Fred W. Householder and Sol Saporta (eds.), Problems in Lexicography, 2nd rev. ed. (1967), papers of a conference held in 1960, of which the paper by Clarence L. Barnhart, “Problems in Editing Commercial Monolingual Dictionaries,” pp. 161–181, is especially practical; Ladislav Zgusta, Manual of Lexicography (1971); Allen Walker Read, “Approaches to Lexicography and Semantics,” in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 10, pp. 145–205 (1972); the proceedings of an “International Conference on Lexicography in English,” published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1973); R.R.K. Hartmann (ed.), Lexicography: Principles and Practice (1983), a collection of papers concerned with the making of dictionaries; Ronald A. Wells, Dictionaries and the Authoritarian Tradition: A Study in English Usage and Lexicography (1973); Sidney I. Landau, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (1984); and Robert Burchfield, Unlocking the English Language (1989), which discusses, among other topics, the handling by dictionary makers of religious, ethnic, and racial epithets and the growing discontinuity between American and British English. Current discussions and reviews can be found in Dictionaries (annual) and International Journal of Lexicography (quarterly).

Evaluative studies

Kenneth F. Kister, Kister’s Best Dictionaries for Adults & Young People (1992), is an annotated comparative guide to American and British works; while Brendan Loughridge, Which Dictionary? (1990), reviews only British dictionaries, thesauri, and language guides; both contain lists of evaluation criteria.

* * *

Asked by: Prof. Roy Turner

Score: 4.1/5
(68 votes)

A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc.. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.

What does the term dictionary mean?

1 : a book giving the meaning and usually the pronunciation of words listed in alphabetical order. 2 : a reference book explaining words of a particular subject listed in alphabetical order a medical dictionary. 3 : a book listing words of one language in alphabetical order with definitions in another language.

What is dictionary in simple words?

A dictionary is a type of book which explains the meanings of words or, more precisely, lexemes. The words are arranged in alphabetical order so that they can be found quickly. The word «dictionary» comes from the Latin «dictio» («saying»).

Why is the word dictionary in the dictionary?

Why are dictionaries called dictionaries? One could argue that dictionaries are called as such because they tell the user how to say things. Or you could say that the Latin word dictio means ‘a word’, and so a dictionary might be seen as a compendium of words.

Does the dictionary have the word dictionary in it?

Yes. We can find the word dictionary in a dictionary.

42 related questions found

Last Updated:
2 Apr 2023
— Updated example sentences