Types of Dictionaries

is a collection of words in one or more specific languages. They are often arranged alphabetically. Dictionaries may include information on definitions, usage,etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, translation. Some dictionaries are books of words in one language with their equivalents in another.

There are general and specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, such words are called terms.

A dictionary

There are other types of dictionaries, for instance bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms, and rhyming dictionaries.

There are also prescriptive (explain correct use of the language) and descriptive

dictionaries (actual use). The first recorded dictionaries date back to Sumerian times. They were bilingual dictionaries.

The systematic study of dictionaries was

initiated in the 20th-century by Ladislav

Zgusta. This study is called lexicography.

History

The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian Empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria) and dated roughly 2300 BC. A Chinese dictionary, the c. 3rd century BC Erya, was the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary. The Qamus al-Muhit is the first handy dictionary in Arabic, which includes only words and their definitions, eliminating the supporting examples used in such dictionaries as the Lisan and the Oxford English Dictionary. In medieval Europe,

glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use. The Catholicon (1287) by Johannes Balbus, a large grammatical work with an alphabetical lexicon, was widely adopted. It served as the basis for several bilingual dictionaries and was one of the earliest books (in 1460) to be printed. The first edition of A Greek-English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott appeared in 1843. In 1863 Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl published the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.

English Dictionaries in Britain

The earliest dictionaries in the English language were glossaries of French, Spanish or Latin words along with their definitions in English. The word "dictionary" was invented by an Englishman called John of Garland in 1220 — he had written a book Dictionarius to help with Latin "diction". An early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie, created by Richard Mulcaster in 1582.The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written by English

Akkadian Empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists

schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. John Wilkins' 1668 essay on philosophical language contains a list of 11,500 words with careful distinctions, compiled by William Lloyd.It was not until Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that a more reliable English dictionary was produced. Many people today mistakenly believe that Johnson wrote the first English dictionary: a testimony to this legacy.Johnson's dictionary remained the English-language standard for over 150 years, until the Oxford University Press began writing and releasing the Oxford English Dictionary in short fascicles from 1884 onwards.gjgj

American English dictionaries

In 1806, American Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. It was an attempt to evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit.Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings, replacing "colour" with "color", substituting "wagon" for "waggon", and printing "center" instead of "centre". He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash", that did not appear in British dictionaries.

Types

In a general dictionary, each word may have multiple meanings. Some dictionaries include each separate meaning in the order of most common usage while others list definitions in historical order, with the oldest usage first.

In many languages, words can appear in many different forms, but only the undeclined or unconjugated form appears as the headword in most dictionaries. Dictionaries are most commonly found in the form of a book, but some newer dictionaries, like StarDict and the New Oxford American Dictionary are dictionary software running on PDAs or computers. There are also many online dictionaries accessible via the Internet.

Prescriptive vs descriptive

Lexicographers apply two basic philosophies to the defining of words: prescriptive or descriptive. Noah Webster, intent on forging a distinct identity for the American language, altered spellings and accentuated differences in meaning and pronunciation of some words. This is why American English now uses the spelling color while the rest of the English-speaking world prefers colour. (Similarly, British English subsequently underwent a few spelling changes that did not affect American English; see further at American and British English spelling differences.)

Large 20th-century dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Webster's Third are descriptive, and attempt to describe the actual use of words. Most dictionaries of English now apply the descriptive method to a word's definition, and then, outside of the definition itself, add information alerting readers to attitudes which may influence their choices on words often considered vulgar, offensive, erroneous, or easily confused.

Because of the widespread use of dictionaries in schools, and their acceptance by many as language authorities, their treatment of the language does affect usage to some degree, with even the most descriptive dictionaries providing conservative continuity. In the long run, however, the meanings of words in English are primarily determined by usage, and the language is being changed and created every day. Sometimes the same dictionary can be descriptive in some domains and prescriptive in others.

Dictionaries for natural language processing

In contrast to traditional dictionaries, which are designed to be used by human beings, dictionaries for natural language processing (NLP) are built to be used by computer programs. The final user is a human being but the direct user is a program. Such a dictionary does not need to be able to be printed on paper. Because most of these dictionaries are used to control machine translations or cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) the content is usually multilingual and usually of huge size. In order to allow formalized exchange and merging of dictionaries, an ISO standard called Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) has been defined and used among the industrial and academic community.
Further information: Machine-readable dictionary.

Other types:

Bilingual dictionary
Electronic dictionary
Monolingual learner's dictionary
- Advanced learner's dictionary
By sound
- Phonetic dictionary
- Rhyming dictionary
Reverse dictionary
Visual dictionary
Satirical dictionary

Example of visual dictionary

Pronunciation

In many languages, such as the English language, the pronunciation of some words is not apparent from their spelling. In these languages, dictionaries usually provide the pronunciation. For example, the definition for the word dictionary might be followed by the International Phonetic Alphabet spelling /ˈdɪkʃənɛri/. American English dictionaries often use their own pronunciation respelling systems with diacritics, for example dictionary is respelled as "dĭk′shə-nĕr′ē" in the American Heritage Dictionary.

The IPA is more commonly used within the British Commonwealth countries. Yet others use their own pronunciation respelling systems without diacritics: for example, dictionary may be respelled as DIK-shə-nair-ee. Some online or electronic dictionaries provide audio recordings of words being spoken.

Prescriptive Anchor