Search results
Teachers should not neglect dictionary work. Like pronunciation, it is a natural part of any course that needs to have an appropriate focus and allocation of time. By encouraging the intelligent and self-guided use of dictionaries, learners become more independent, and as teachers this is one of our core goals.
Mar 6, 2024 · Learner’s Dictionaries. Learner’s dictionaries are specifically designed for non-native English speakers. These dictionaries simplify complex definitions and focus on the most relevant meanings of a word for learners. “Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary” and “Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English” are notable examples.
- Overview
- From Classical times to 1604
- From 1604 to 1828
- Since 1828
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 dictionary comes from the Latin dictio, “the act of speaking,” and dictionarius, “a collection of words.” Although encyclopaedias are a different type of reference work, some use the word dictionary in their names (e.g., biographical dictionaries).
(Read H.L. Mencken’s 1926 Britannica essay on American English.)
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.
Britannica Quiz
Challenging Words You Should Know Vocabulary Quiz Vol. 2
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 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 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, 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.
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 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.
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, 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.
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. Germanic scholars such as Franz Bopp and Rasmus Rask 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, 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, who began working on his Dictionnaire de la langue française in 1844, but, with interruptions of the Revolutions of 1848 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. 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. 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, 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 (who published his Etymologicum linguae Latinae 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. Forward steps were taken under two editors, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick James Furnivall, until, in 1879, James Augustus Henry Murray, 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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, edited by William Dwight Whitney. It contained much encyclopaedic material but bears comparison even with the OED. Isaac Kauffman Funk, 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.
- Allen Walker Read
The OED is the definitive record of the English language, featuring 600,000 words, 3 million quotations, and over 1,000 years of English. Oxford English Dictionary Skip to main content
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and usage of 500,000 words and phrases past and present, from across the English-speaking world. As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from dictionaries of current English ...
Feb 7, 2006 · The Dictionary of Newfoundland English (1982; 2nd ed. 1990), edited by G.M. Story, W.J. Kirwin and J.D.A. Widdowson, uses authenticated oral evidence as well as citations from Newfoundland literature and folklore. T.K. Pratt's Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English (1988) is similarly based on oral surveys and written sources.
People also ask
What are the Best Dictionaries for learning English?
What are learner's dictionaries?
What are some examples of English dictionaries?
What does a dictionary do?
What are the different types of dictionaries?
Why are dictionaries important?
Often a word, or sense of a word, will be followed by a usage label (written in italics). These labels are designed to give the user of the dictionary some additional information about the word. Here is a list of our usage labels, and what each one means. Obsolete: this means that there no evidence of a word’s use since 1755.
