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Dictionary

A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc.[1][2][3] It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.[4]

Langenscheidt dictionaries in various languages
A multi-volume Latin dictionary by Egidio Forcellini
Dictionary definition entries

A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a complete range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionaries are supposed[citation needed] to be semasiological, mapping word to definition, while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological, first identifying concepts and then establishing the terms used to designate them. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types.[5] There are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual (translation) dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms (thesauri), and rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary (unqualified) is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary.[6]

There is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries; the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use. Stylistic indications (e.g. "informal" or "vulgar") in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive.[7]

The first recorded dictionaries date back to Sumerian times around 2300 BCE, in the form of bilingual dictionaries, and the oldest surviving monolingual dictionaries are Chinese dictionaries c. 3rd century BCE. The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written in 1604, and monolingual dictionaries in other languages also began appearing in Europe at around this time. The systematic study of dictionaries as objects of scientific interest arose as a 20th-century enterprise, called lexicography, and largely initiated by Ladislav Zgusta.[6] The birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, with the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of having an "astonishing" lack of method and critical-self reflection.[8]

History

The oldest known dictionaries were cuneiform tablets with bilingual SumerianAkkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria) and dated to roughly 2300 BCE, the time of the Akkadian Empire.[9][10][11] The early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. A Chinese dictionary, the c. 3rd century BCE Erya, is the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary; and some sources cite the Shizhoupian (probably compiled sometime between 700 BCE to 200 BCE, possibly earlier) as a "dictionary", although modern scholarship considers it a calligraphic compendium of Chinese characters from Zhou dynasty bronzes.[citation needed] Philitas of Cos (fl. 4th century BCE) wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words (Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι, Átaktoi glôssai) which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words, words from local dialects, and technical terms.[12] Apollonius the Sophist (fl. 1st century CE) wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon.[10] The first Sanskrit dictionary, the Amarakośa, was written by Amarasimha c. 4th century CE. Written in verse, it listed around 10,000 words. According to the Nihon Shoki, the first Japanese dictionary was the long-lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters. The oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the c. 835 CE Tenrei Banshō Meigi, was also a glossary of written Chinese. In Frahang-i Pahlavig, Aramaic heterograms are listed together with their translation in the Middle Persian language and phonetic transcription in the Pazend alphabet. A 9th-century CE Irish dictionary, Sanas Cormaic, contained etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words. In the 12th century, The Karakhanid-Turkic scholar Mahmud Kashgari finished his work "Divan-u Lügat'it Türk", a dictionary about the Turkic dialects, but especially Karakhanid Turkic. His work contains about 7500 to 8000 words and it was written to teach non Turkic Muslims, especially the Abbasid Arabs, the Turkic language.[13] Al-Zamakhshari wrote a small Arabic dictionary called "Muḳaddimetü'l-edeb" for the Turkic-Khwarazm ruler Atsiz.[14] In the 14th century, the Codex Cumanicus was finished and it served as a dictionary about the Cuman-Turkic language. While in Mamluk Egypt, Ebû Hayyân el-Endelüsî finished his work "Kitâbü'l-İdrâk li-lisâni'l-Etrâk", a dictionary about the Kipchak and Turcoman languages spoken in Egypt and the Levant.[15] A dictionary called "Bahşayiş Lügati", which is written in old Anatolian Turkish, served also as a dictionary between Oghuz Turkish, Arabic and Persian. But it is not clear who wrote the dictionary or in which century exactly it was published. It was written in old Anatolian Turkish from the Seljuk period and not the late medieval Ottoman period.[16] In India around 1320, Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari, which mainly dealt with Hindustani and Persian words.[17]

 
The French-language Petit Larousse is an example of an illustrated dictionary.

Arabic dictionaries were compiled between the 8th and 14th centuries CE, organizing words in rhyme order (by the last syllable), by alphabetical order of the radicals, or according to the alphabetical order of the first letter (the system used in modern European language dictionaries). The modern system was mainly used in specialist dictionaries, such as those of terms from the Qur'an and hadith, while most general use dictionaries, such as the Lisan al-`Arab (13th century, still the best-known large-scale dictionary of Arabic) and al-Qamus al-Muhit (14th century) listed words in the alphabetical order of the radicals. 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.[18]

In medieval Europe, glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use (e.g. the Leiden Glossary). 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. In 1502 Ambrogio Calepino's Dictionarium was published, originally a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary. In 1532 Robert Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae latinae and in 1572 his son Henri Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae graecae, which served up to the 19th century as the basis of Greek lexicography. The first monolingual Spanish dictionary written was Sebastián Covarrubias's Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, published in 1611 in Madrid, Spain.[19] In 1612 the first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, for Italian, was published. It served as the model for similar works in French and English. In 1690 in Rotterdam was published, posthumously, the Dictionnaire Universel by Antoine Furetière for French. In 1694 appeared the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (still published, with the ninth edition not complete as of 2021). Between 1712 and 1721 was published the Vocabulario portughez e latino written by Raphael Bluteau. The Real Academia Española published the first edition of the Diccionario de la lengua española (still published, with a new edition about every decade) in 1780; their Diccionario de Autoridades, which included quotes taken from literary works, was published in 1726. The Totius Latinitatis lexicon by Egidio Forcellini was firstly published in 1777; it has formed the basis of all similar works that have since been published.

The first edition of A Greek-English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott appeared in 1843; this work remained the basic dictionary of Greek until the end of the 20th century. And in 1858 was published the first volume of the Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Brothers Grimm; the work was completed in 1961. Between 1861 and 1874 was published the Dizionario della lingua italiana by Niccolò Tommaseo. Between 1862 and 1874 was published the six volumes of A magyar nyelv szótára (Dictionary of Hungarian Language) by Gergely Czuczor and János Fogarasi. Émile Littré published the Dictionnaire de la langue française between 1863 and 1872. In the same year 1863 appeared the first volume of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal which was completed in 1998. Also in 1863 Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl published the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. The Duden dictionary dates back to 1880, and is currently the prescriptive source for the spelling of German. The decision to start work on the Svenska Akademiens ordbok was taken in 1787.[20]

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".[21] An early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie, created by Richard Mulcaster in 1582.[22][23]

The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604.[2][3] The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This dictionary, and the many imitators which followed it, was seen as unreliable and nowhere near definitive. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield was still lamenting in 1754, 150 years after Cawdrey's publication, that it is "a sort of disgrace to our nation, that hitherto we have had no… standard of our language; our dictionaries at present being more properly what our neighbors the Dutch and the Germans call theirs, word-books, than dictionaries in the superior sense of that title."[24]

In 1616, John Bullokar described the history of the dictionary with his "English Expositor". Glossographia by Thomas Blount, published in 1656, contains more than 10,000 words along with their etymologies or histories. Edward Phillips wrote another dictionary in 1658, entitled "The New World of English Words: Or a General Dictionary" which boldly plagiarized Blount's work, and the two criticised each other. This created more interest in the dictionaries. John Wilkins' 1668 essay on philosophical language contains a list of 11,500 words with careful distinctions, compiled by William Lloyd.[25] Elisha Coles published his "English Dictionary" in 1676.

It was not until Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that a more reliable English dictionary was produced.[3] Many people today mistakenly believe that Johnson wrote the first English dictionary: a testimony to this legacy.[2][26] By this stage, dictionaries had evolved to contain textual references for most words, and were arranged alphabetically, rather than by topic (a previously popular form of arrangement, which meant all animals would be grouped together, etc.). Johnson's masterwork could be judged as the first to bring all these elements together, creating the first "modern" dictionary.[26]

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.[3][27] It took nearly 50 years to complete this huge work, and they finally released the complete OED in twelve volumes in 1928.[27] One of the main contributors to this modern dictionary was an ex-army surgeon, William Chester Minor, a convicted murderer who was confined to an asylum for the criminally insane.[28]

The OED remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day, with revisions and updates added by a dedicated team every three months.

American English dictionaries

In 1806, American Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.[3] In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language; it took twenty-seven years to complete. 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 completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced spellings that became American English, replacing "colour" with "color", substituting "wagon" for "waggon", and printing "center" instead of "centre". He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash," which did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828; it sold 2500 copies. In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. Webster's dictionary was acquired by G & C Merriam Co. in 1843, after his death, and has since been published in many revised editions. Merriam-Webster was acquired by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1964.

Controversy over the lack of usage advice in the 1961 Webster's Third New International Dictionary spurred publication of the 1969 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the first dictionary to use corpus linguistics.

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.[29]

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.

Specialized dictionaries

According to the Manual of Specialized Lexicographies, a specialized dictionary, also referred to as a technical dictionary, is a dictionary that focuses upon a specific subject field, as opposed to a dictionary that comprehensively contains words from the lexicon of a specific language or languages. Following the description in The Bilingual LSP Dictionary, lexicographers categorize specialized dictionaries into three types: A multi-field dictionary broadly covers several subject fields (e.g. a business dictionary), a single-field dictionary narrowly covers one particular subject field (e.g. law), and a sub-field dictionary covers a more specialized field (e.g. constitutional law). For example, the 23-language Inter-Active Terminology for Europe is a multi-field dictionary, the American National Biography is a single-field, and the African American National Biography Project is a sub-field dictionary. In terms of the coverage distinction between "minimizing dictionaries" and "maximizing dictionaries", multi-field dictionaries tend to minimize coverage across subject fields (for instance, Oxford Dictionary of World Religions and Yadgar Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms)[30] whereas single-field and sub-field dictionaries tend to maximize coverage within a limited subject field (The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology).

Another variant is the glossary, an alphabetical list of defined terms in a specialized field, such as medicine (medical dictionary).

Defining dictionaries

The simplest dictionary, a defining dictionary, provides a core glossary of the simplest meanings of the simplest concepts. From these, other concepts can be explained and defined, in particular for those who are first learning a language. In English, the commercial defining dictionaries typically include only one or two meanings of under 2000 words. With these, the rest of English, and even the 4000 most common English idioms and metaphors, can be defined.

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.)[31]

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, provide information alerting readers to attitudes which may influence their choices on words often considered vulgar, offensive, erroneous, or easily confused.[32] Merriam-Webster is subtle, only adding italicized notations such as, sometimes offensive or stand (nonstandard). American Heritage goes further, discussing issues separately in numerous "usage notes." Encarta provides similar notes, but is more prescriptive, offering warnings and admonitions against the use of certain words considered by many to be offensive or illiterate, such as, "an offensive term for..." or "a taboo term meaning...".

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.[33] As Jorge Luis Borges says in the prologue to "El otro, el mismo": "It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature."

Sometimes the same dictionary can be descriptive in some domains and prescriptive in others. For example, according to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary is "at war with itself": whereas its coverage (lexical items) and glosses (definitions) are descriptive and colloquial, its vocalization is prescriptive. This internal conflict results in absurd sentences such as hi taharóg otí kshetiré me asíti lamkhonít (she'll tear me apart when she sees what I've done to the car). Whereas hi taharóg otí, literally 'she will kill me', is colloquial, me (a variant of ma 'what') is archaic, resulting in a combination that is unutterable in real life.[34]

Historical dictionaries

A historical dictionary is a specific kind of descriptive dictionary which describes the development of words and senses over time, usually using citations to original source material to support its conclusions.[35]

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. The structure of the content is not linear, ordered entry by entry but has the form of a complex network (see Diathesis alternation). 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.[36]

Other types

Pronunciation

In many languages, such as the English language, the pronunciation of some words is not consistently 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 /ˈdɪkʃənəri/ (in British English) or /ˈdɪkʃənɛri/ (in American English). American English dictionaries often use their own pronunciation respelling systems with diacritics, for example dictionary is respelled as "dĭkshə-nĕr′ē" in the American Heritage Dictionary.[37] 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-nerr-ee. Some online or electronic dictionaries provide audio recordings of words being spoken.

Examples

Major English dictionaries

Dictionaries of other languages

Histories and descriptions of the dictionaries of other languages on Wikipedia include:

Online dictionaries

The age of the Internet brought online dictionaries to the desktop and, more recently, to the smart phone. David Skinner in 2013 noted that "Among the top ten lookups on Merriam-Webster Online at this moment are holistic, pragmatic, caveat, esoteric and bourgeois. Teaching users about words they don't already know has been, historically, an aim of lexicography, and modern dictionaries do this well."[38]

There exist a number of websites which operate as online dictionaries, usually with a specialized focus. Some of them have exclusively user driven content, often consisting of neologisms. Some of the more notable examples are given in List of online dictionaries and Category:Online dictionaries.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, 2002
  2. ^ a b c Nordquist, Richard (August 9, 2019). . ThoughtCo. Archived from the original on May 26, 2022. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
  3. ^ a b c d e . Britannica. Archived from the original on July 8, 2022. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
  4. ^ Nielsen, Sandro (2008). "The Effect of Lexicographical Information Costs on Dictionary Naming and Use". Lexikos. 18: 170–189. ISSN 1684-4904.
  5. ^ A Practical Guide to Lexicography, Sterkenburg 2003, pp. 155–157
  6. ^ a b A Practical Guide to Lexicography, Sterkenburg 2003, pp. 3–4
  7. ^ A Practical Guide to Lexicography, Sterkenburg 2003, p. 7
  8. ^ R. R. K. Hartmann (2003). Lexicography: Dictionaries, compilers, critics, and users. Routledge. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-415-25366-6.
  9. ^ "DCCLT – Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts". oracc.museum.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-01.
  10. ^ a b . Archived from the original on 2009-10-29.
  11. ^ Jackson, Howard (2022-02-24). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Lexicography. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-350-18172-4.
  12. ^ Peter Bing (2003). "The unruly tongue: Philitas of Cos as scholar and poet". Classical Philology. 98 (4): 330–348. doi:10.1086/422370. S2CID 162304317.
  13. ^ Besim Atalay, Divanü Lügat-it Türk Dizini, TTK Basımevi, Ankara, 1986
  14. ^ Zeki Velidi Togan, Zimahşeri'nin Doğu Türkçesi İle Mukaddimetül Edeb'i
  15. ^ Ahmet Caferoğlu, Kitab Al Idrak Li Lisan Al Atrak, 1931
  16. ^ Bahşāyiş Bin Çalıça, Bahşayiş Lügati: Hazırlayan: Fikret TURAN, Ankara 2017,
  17. ^ Rashid, Omar. "Chasing Khusro". The Hindu. Retrieved 5 August 2012.
  18. ^ "Ḳāmūs", J. Eckmann, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Brill
  19. ^ Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, edición integral e ilustrada de Ignacio Arellano y Rafael Zafra, Madrid, Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2006, pg. XLIX.
  20. ^ "OSA – Om svar anhålles". g3.spraakdata.gu.se. Retrieved 13 October 2017.
  21. ^ Mark Forsyth. The etymologicon. // Icon Books Ltd. London N79DP, 2011. p. 128
  22. ^ "1582 – Mulcaster's Elementarie". www.bl.uk. Retrieved 13 October 2017.
  23. ^ A Brief History of English Lexicography 2008-03-09 at the Wayback Machine, Peter Erdmann and See-Young Cho, Technische Universität Berlin, 1999.
  24. ^ Jack Lynch, "How Johnson's Dictionary Became the First Dictionary" (delivered 25 August 2005 at the Johnson and the English Language conference, Birmingham) Retrieved July 12, 2008,
  25. ^ John P. Considine (27 March 2008). Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage. Cambridge University Press. p. 298. ISBN 978-0-521-88674-1. Retrieved 16 May 2016.
  26. ^ a b "Lynch, "How Johnson's Dictionary Became the First Dictionary"". andromeda.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 13 October 2017.
  27. ^ a b . History. Archived from the original on May 27, 2022. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
  28. ^ Simon Winchester, The Surgeon of Crowthorne.
  29. ^ . Archived from the original on 2010-04-25. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
  30. ^ Times, The Sindh (24 February 2015). . Archived from the original on 11 October 2017. Retrieved 13 October 2017.
  31. ^ Phil Benson (2002). Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary. Taylor & Francis. pp. 8–11. ISBN 9780203205716.
  32. ^ Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade; Wim van der Wurff (2009). Current Issues in Late Modern English. Peter Lang. pp. 41–42. ISBN 9783039116607.
  33. ^ Ned Halley, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Modern English Grammar (2005), p. 84
  34. ^ Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (1999). Review of the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary, International Journal of Lexicography 12.4, pp. 325-346.
  35. ^ See for example Toyin Falola, et al. Historical dictionary of Nigeria (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) excerpt
  36. ^ Imad Zeroual, and Abdelhak Lakhouaja, "Data science in light of natural language processing: An overview." Procedia Computer Science 127 (2018): 82-91 online.
  37. ^ "dictionary". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). HarperCollins.
  38. ^ Skinner, David (May 17, 2013). . Opinionator. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2013-05-18. Retrieved 2020-08-13.

References

Further reading

  • Guy Jean Forgue, "The Norm in American English", Revue Française d'Etudes Americaines, Nov 1983, Vol. 8 Issue 18, pp. 451–461. An international appreciation of the importance of Webster's dictionaries in setting the norms of the English language.

External links

dictionary, other, uses, disambiguation, dictionary, listing, lexemes, from, lexicon, more, specific, languages, often, arranged, alphabetically, radical, stroke, ideographic, languages, which, include, information, definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciati. For other uses see Dictionary disambiguation A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages often arranged alphabetically or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages which may include information on definitions usage etymologies pronunciations translation etc 1 2 3 It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter relationships among the data 4 Langenscheidt dictionaries in various languages A multi volume Latin dictionary by Egidio Forcellini Dictionary definition entries A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields rather than a complete range of words in the language Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study In theory general dictionaries are supposed citation needed to be semasiological mapping word to definition while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological first identifying concepts and then establishing the terms used to designate them In practice the two approaches are used for both types 5 There are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction for instance bilingual translation dictionaries dictionaries of synonyms thesauri and rhyming dictionaries The word dictionary unqualified is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary 6 There is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use Stylistic indications e g informal or vulgar in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive 7 The first recorded dictionaries date back to Sumerian times around 2300 BCE in the form of bilingual dictionaries and the oldest surviving monolingual dictionaries are Chinese dictionaries c 3rd century BCE The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall written in 1604 and monolingual dictionaries in other languages also began appearing in Europe at around this time The systematic study of dictionaries as objects of scientific interest arose as a 20th century enterprise called lexicography and largely initiated by Ladislav Zgusta 6 The birth of the new discipline was not without controversy with the practical dictionary makers being sometimes accused by others of having an astonishing lack of method and critical self reflection 8 Contents 1 History 1 1 English dictionaries in Britain 1 2 American English dictionaries 2 Types 2 1 Specialized dictionaries 2 2 Defining dictionaries 2 3 Prescriptive vs descriptive 2 4 Historical dictionaries 2 5 Dictionaries for natural language processing 2 6 Other types 3 Pronunciation 4 Examples 4 1 Major English dictionaries 4 2 Dictionaries of other languages 5 Online dictionaries 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External linksHistoryThe oldest known dictionaries were cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian Akkadian wordlists discovered in Ebla modern Syria and dated to roughly 2300 BCE the time of the Akkadian Empire 9 10 11 The early 2nd millennium BCE Urra hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists A Chinese dictionary the c 3rd century BCE Erya is the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary and some sources cite the Shizhoupian probably compiled sometime between 700 BCE to 200 BCE possibly earlier as a dictionary although modern scholarship considers it a calligraphic compendium of Chinese characters from Zhou dynasty bronzes citation needed Philitas of Cos fl 4th century BCE wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words Ἄtaktoi glῶssai Ataktoi glossai which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words words from local dialects and technical terms 12 Apollonius the Sophist fl 1st century CE wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon 10 The first Sanskrit dictionary the Amarakosa was written by Amarasimha c 4th century CE Written in verse it listed around 10 000 words According to the Nihon Shoki the first Japanese dictionary was the long lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters The oldest existing Japanese dictionary the c 835 CE Tenrei Banshō Meigi was also a glossary of written Chinese In Frahang i Pahlavig Aramaic heterograms are listed together with their translation in the Middle Persian language and phonetic transcription in the Pazend alphabet A 9th century CE Irish dictionary Sanas Cormaic contained etymologies and explanations of over 1 400 Irish words In the 12th century The Karakhanid Turkic scholar Mahmud Kashgari finished his work Divan u Lugat it Turk a dictionary about the Turkic dialects but especially Karakhanid Turkic His work contains about 7500 to 8000 words and it was written to teach non Turkic Muslims especially the Abbasid Arabs the Turkic language 13 Al Zamakhshari wrote a small Arabic dictionary called Muḳaddimetu l edeb for the Turkic Khwarazm ruler Atsiz 14 In the 14th century the Codex Cumanicus was finished and it served as a dictionary about the Cuman Turkic language While in Mamluk Egypt Ebu Hayyan el Endelusi finished his work Kitabu l Idrak li lisani l Etrak a dictionary about the Kipchak and Turcoman languages spoken in Egypt and the Levant 15 A dictionary called Bahsayis Lugati which is written in old Anatolian Turkish served also as a dictionary between Oghuz Turkish Arabic and Persian But it is not clear who wrote the dictionary or in which century exactly it was published It was written in old Anatolian Turkish from the Seljuk period and not the late medieval Ottoman period 16 In India around 1320 Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq e bari which mainly dealt with Hindustani and Persian words 17 The French language Petit Larousse is an example of an illustrated dictionary Arabic dictionaries were compiled between the 8th and 14th centuries CE organizing words in rhyme order by the last syllable by alphabetical order of the radicals or according to the alphabetical order of the first letter the system used in modern European language dictionaries The modern system was mainly used in specialist dictionaries such as those of terms from the Qur an and hadith while most general use dictionaries such as the Lisan al Arab 13th century still the best known large scale dictionary of Arabic and al Qamus al Muhit 14th century listed words in the alphabetical order of the radicals 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 18 1612 Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca In medieval Europe glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use e g the Leiden Glossary 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 In 1502 Ambrogio Calepino s Dictionarium was published originally a monolingual Latin dictionary which over the course of the 16th century was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary In 1532 Robert Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae latinae and in 1572 his son Henri Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae graecae which served up to the 19th century as the basis of Greek lexicography The first monolingual Spanish dictionary written was Sebastian Covarrubias s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola published in 1611 in Madrid Spain 19 In 1612 the first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca for Italian was published It served as the model for similar works in French and English In 1690 in Rotterdam was published posthumously the Dictionnaire Universel by Antoine Furetiere for French In 1694 appeared the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l Academie francaise still published with the ninth edition not complete as of 2021 update Between 1712 and 1721 was published the Vocabulario portughez e latino written by Raphael Bluteau The Real Academia Espanola published the first edition of the Diccionario de la lengua espanola still published with a new edition about every decade in 1780 their Diccionario de Autoridades which included quotes taken from literary works was published in 1726 The Totius Latinitatis lexicon by Egidio Forcellini was firstly published in 1777 it has formed the basis of all similar works that have since been published The first edition of A Greek English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott appeared in 1843 this work remained the basic dictionary of Greek until the end of the 20th century And in 1858 was published the first volume of the Deutsches Worterbuch by the Brothers Grimm the work was completed in 1961 Between 1861 and 1874 was published the Dizionario della lingua italiana by Niccolo Tommaseo Between 1862 and 1874 was published the six volumes of A magyar nyelv szotara Dictionary of Hungarian Language by Gergely Czuczor and Janos Fogarasi Emile Littre published the Dictionnaire de la langue francaise between 1863 and 1872 In the same year 1863 appeared the first volume of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal which was completed in 1998 Also in 1863 Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl published the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language The Duden dictionary dates back to 1880 and is currently the prescriptive source for the spelling of German The decision to start work on the Svenska Akademiens ordbok was taken in 1787 20 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 21 An early non alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie created by Richard Mulcaster in 1582 22 23 The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604 2 3 The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford This dictionary and the many imitators which followed it was seen as unreliable and nowhere near definitive Philip Stanhope 4th Earl of Chesterfield was still lamenting in 1754 150 years after Cawdrey s publication that it is a sort of disgrace to our nation that hitherto we have had no standard of our language our dictionaries at present being more properly what our neighbors the Dutch and the Germans call theirs word books than dictionaries in the superior sense of that title 24 In 1616 John Bullokar described the history of the dictionary with his English Expositor Glossographia by Thomas Blount published in 1656 contains more than 10 000 words along with their etymologies or histories Edward Phillips wrote another dictionary in 1658 entitled The New World of English Words Or a General Dictionary which boldly plagiarized Blount s work and the two criticised each other This created more interest in the dictionaries John Wilkins 1668 essay on philosophical language contains a list of 11 500 words with careful distinctions compiled by William Lloyd 25 Elisha Coles published his English Dictionary in 1676 It was not until Samuel Johnson s A Dictionary of the English Language 1755 that a more reliable English dictionary was produced 3 Many people today mistakenly believe that Johnson wrote the first English dictionary a testimony to this legacy 2 26 By this stage dictionaries had evolved to contain textual references for most words and were arranged alphabetically rather than by topic a previously popular form of arrangement which meant all animals would be grouped together etc Johnson s masterwork could be judged as the first to bring all these elements together creating the first modern dictionary 26 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 3 27 It took nearly 50 years to complete this huge work and they finally released the complete OED in twelve volumes in 1928 27 One of the main contributors to this modern dictionary was an ex army surgeon William Chester Minor a convicted murderer who was confined to an asylum for the criminally insane 28 The OED remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day with revisions and updates added by a dedicated team every three months American English dictionaries In 1806 American Noah Webster published his first dictionary A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language 3 In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary An American Dictionary of the English Language it took twenty seven years to complete 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 completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris France and at the University of Cambridge His book contained seventy thousand words of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before As a spelling reformer Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex so his dictionary introduced spellings that became American English replacing colour with color substituting wagon for waggon and printing center instead of centre He also added American words like skunk and squash which did not appear in British dictionaries At the age of seventy Webster published his dictionary in 1828 it sold 2500 copies In 1840 the second edition was published in two volumes Webster s dictionary was acquired by G amp C Merriam Co in 1843 after his death and has since been published in many revised editions Merriam Webster was acquired by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1964 Controversy over the lack of usage advice in the 1961 Webster s Third New International Dictionary spurred publication of the 1969 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language the first dictionary to use corpus linguistics TypesIn 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 29 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 Specialized dictionaries Main article Specialized dictionary According to the Manual of Specialized Lexicographies a specialized dictionary also referred to as a technical dictionary is a dictionary that focuses upon a specific subject field as opposed to a dictionary that comprehensively contains words from the lexicon of a specific language or languages Following the description in The Bilingual LSP Dictionary lexicographers categorize specialized dictionaries into three types A multi field dictionary broadly covers several subject fields e g a business dictionary a single field dictionary narrowly covers one particular subject field e g law and a sub field dictionary covers a more specialized field e g constitutional law For example the 23 language Inter Active Terminology for Europe is a multi field dictionary the American National Biography is a single field and the African American National Biography Project is a sub field dictionary In terms of the coverage distinction between minimizing dictionaries and maximizing dictionaries multi field dictionaries tend to minimize coverage across subject fields for instance Oxford Dictionary of World Religions and Yadgar Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms 30 whereas single field and sub field dictionaries tend to maximize coverage within a limited subject field The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology Another variant is the glossary an alphabetical list of defined terms in a specialized field such as medicine medical dictionary Defining dictionaries The simplest dictionary a defining dictionary provides a core glossary of the simplest meanings of the simplest concepts From these other concepts can be explained and defined in particular for those who are first learning a language In English the commercial defining dictionaries typically include only one or two meanings of under 2000 words With these the rest of English and even the 4000 most common English idioms and metaphors can be defined 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 31 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 provide information alerting readers to attitudes which may influence their choices on words often considered vulgar offensive erroneous or easily confused 32 Merriam Webster is subtle only adding italicized notations such as sometimes offensive or stand nonstandard American Heritage goes further discussing issues separately in numerous usage notes Encarta provides similar notes but is more prescriptive offering warnings and admonitions against the use of certain words considered by many to be offensive or illiterate such as an offensive term for or a taboo term meaning 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 33 As Jorge Luis Borges says in the prologue to El otro el mismo It is often forgotten that dictionaries are artificial repositories put together well after the languages they define The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature Sometimes the same dictionary can be descriptive in some domains and prescriptive in others For example according to Ghil ad Zuckermann the Oxford English Hebrew Dictionary is at war with itself whereas its coverage lexical items and glosses definitions are descriptive and colloquial its vocalization is prescriptive This internal conflict results in absurd sentences such as hi taharog oti kshetire me asiti lamkhonit she ll tear me apart when she sees what I ve done to the car Whereas hi taharog oti literally she will kill me is colloquial me a variant of ma what is archaic resulting in a combination that is unutterable in real life 34 Historical dictionaries A historical dictionary is a specific kind of descriptive dictionary which describes the development of words and senses over time usually using citations to original source material to support its conclusions 35 Dictionaries for natural language processing Further information Machine readable dictionary 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 The structure of the content is not linear ordered entry by entry but has the form of a complex network see Diathesis alternation 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 36 Other types Bilingual dictionary Collegiate dictionary American Learner s dictionary mostly British Electronic dictionary Encyclopedic dictionary Monolingual learner s dictionary Advanced learner s dictionary By sound Rhyming dictionary Reverse dictionary Conceptual dictionary Visual dictionary Satirical dictionary Phonetic dictionaryPronunciationMain article Pronunciation respelling for English In many languages such as the English language the pronunciation of some words is not consistently 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 ˈ d ɪ k ʃ e n er i in British English or ˈ d ɪ k ʃ e n ɛr i in American English American English dictionaries often use their own pronunciation respelling systems with diacritics for example dictionary is respelled as dĭk she nĕr e in the American Heritage Dictionary 37 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 she nerr ee Some online or electronic dictionaries provide audio recordings of words being spoken ExamplesMajor English dictionaries A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson prescriptive The American College Dictionary by Clarence L Barnhart The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Black s Law Dictionary a law dictionary Brewer s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable Canadian Oxford Dictionary Century Dictionary Chambers Dictionary Collins English Dictionary Concise Oxford English Dictionary Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Longman Macmillan Dictionary Macquarie Dictionary a dictionary of Australian English Merriam Webster a dictionary of American English Oxford Dictionary of English Oxford English Dictionary descriptive well known as OED O E D Random House Dictionary of the English Language Webster s New World Dictionary especially the college edition used as the official desk dictionary of many American press journalists Further information Comparison of English dictionaries Dictionaries of other languages Histories and descriptions of the dictionaries of other languages on Wikipedia include Arabic dictionaries Chinese dictionaries Dehkhoda Dictionary Persian Language Dutch dictionaries French dictionaries German dictionaries Japanese dictionaries Polish dictionaries Scottish Gaelic dictionaries Scottish Language Dictionaries Sindhi Language DictionariesOnline dictionariesFurther information List of online dictionaries and Category Online dictionaries The age of the Internet brought online dictionaries to the desktop and more recently to the smart phone David Skinner in 2013 noted that Among the top ten lookups on Merriam Webster Online at this moment are holistic pragmatic caveat esoteric and bourgeois Teaching users about words they don t already know has been historically an aim of lexicography and modern dictionaries do this well 38 There exist a number of websites which operate as online dictionaries usually with a specialized focus Some of them have exclusively user driven content often consisting of neologisms Some of the more notable examples are given in List of online dictionaries and Category Online dictionaries See also Books portal Comparison of English dictionaries Centre for Lexicography COBUILD a large corpus of English text Corpus linguistics DICT the dictionary server protocol Dictionary Society of North America Fictitious entry Foreign language writing aid Lexicographic error Lists of dictionaries Thesaurus Dreaming of WordsNotes Webster s New World College Dictionary Fourth Edition 2002 a b c Nordquist Richard August 9 2019 The Features Functions and Limitations of Dictionaries ThoughtCo Archived from the original on May 26 2022 Retrieved November 13 2022 a b c d e Dictionary Britannica Archived from the original on July 8 2022 Retrieved November 13 2022 Nielsen Sandro 2008 The Effect of Lexicographical Information Costs on Dictionary Naming and Use Lexikos 18 170 189 ISSN 1684 4904 A Practical Guide to Lexicography Sterkenburg 2003 pp 155 157 a b A Practical Guide to Lexicography Sterkenburg 2003 pp 3 4 A Practical Guide to Lexicography Sterkenburg 2003 p 7 R R K Hartmann 2003 Lexicography Dictionaries compilers critics and users Routledge p 21 ISBN 978 0 415 25366 6 DCCLT Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts oracc museum upenn edu Retrieved 2022 03 01 a b Dictionary MSN Encarta Archived from the original on 2009 10 29 Jackson Howard 2022 02 24 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Lexicography Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN 978 1 350 18172 4 Peter Bing 2003 The unruly tongue Philitas of Cos as scholar and poet Classical Philology 98 4 330 348 doi 10 1086 422370 S2CID 162304317 Besim Atalay Divanu Lugat it Turk Dizini TTK Basimevi Ankara 1986 Zeki Velidi Togan Zimahseri nin Dogu Turkcesi Ile Mukaddimetul Edeb i Ahmet Caferoglu Kitab Al Idrak Li Lisan Al Atrak 1931 Bahsayis Bin Calica Bahsayis Lugati Hazirlayan Fikret TURAN Ankara 2017 Rashid Omar Chasing Khusro The Hindu Retrieved 5 August 2012 Ḳamus J Eckmann Encyclopaedia of Islam 2nd ed Brill Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola edicion integral e ilustrada de Ignacio Arellano y Rafael Zafra Madrid Iberoamericana Vervuert 2006 pg XLIX OSA Om svar anhalles g3 spraakdata gu se Retrieved 13 October 2017 Mark Forsyth The etymologicon Icon Books Ltd London N79DP 2011 p 128 1582 Mulcaster s Elementarie www bl uk Retrieved 13 October 2017 A Brief History of English Lexicography Archived 2008 03 09 at the Wayback Machine Peter Erdmann and See Young Cho Technische Universitat Berlin 1999 Jack Lynch How Johnson s Dictionary Became the First Dictionary delivered 25 August 2005 at the Johnson and the English Language conference Birmingham Retrieved July 12 2008 John P Considine 27 March 2008 Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe Lexicography and the Making of Heritage Cambridge University Press p 298 ISBN 978 0 521 88674 1 Retrieved 16 May 2016 a b Lynch How Johnson s Dictionary Became the First Dictionary andromeda rutgers edu Retrieved 13 October 2017 a b Oxford Dictionary Debuts History Archived from the original on May 27 2022 Retrieved November 13 2022 Simon Winchester The Surgeon of Crowthorne Language Core Reference Sources Texas State Library Archived from the original on 2010 04 25 Retrieved 2010 08 22 Times The Sindh 24 February 2015 The first English to Einglish and Sindhi Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms published The Sindh Times Archived from the original on 11 October 2017 Retrieved 13 October 2017 Phil Benson 2002 Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary Taylor amp Francis pp 8 11 ISBN 9780203205716 Ingrid Tieken Boon van Ostade Wim van der Wurff 2009 Current Issues in Late Modern English Peter Lang pp 41 42 ISBN 9783039116607 Ned Halley The Wordsworth Dictionary of Modern English Grammar 2005 p 84 Zuckermann Ghil ad 1999 Review of the Oxford English Hebrew Dictionary International Journal of Lexicography 12 4 pp 325 346 See for example Toyin Falola et al Historical dictionary of Nigeria Rowman amp Littlefield 2018 excerpt Imad Zeroual and Abdelhak Lakhouaja Data science in light of natural language processing An overview Procedia Computer Science 127 2018 82 91 online dictionary The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 5th ed HarperCollins Skinner David May 17 2013 The Role of a Dictionary Opinionator The New York Times Archived from the original on 2013 05 18 Retrieved 2020 08 13 ReferencesBergenholtz Henning Tarp Sven eds 1995 Manual of Specialised Lexicography The Preparation of Specialised Dictionaries Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing ISBN 90 272 1612 6 Erdmann Peter Cho See Young A Brief History of English Lexicography Technische Universitat Berlin Archived from the original on 9 March 2008 Retrieved 17 December 2010 Landau Sidney I 2001 1984 Dictionaries The Art and Craft of Lexicography 2nd ed Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 78040 3 Nielsen Sandro 1994 The Bilingual LSP Dictionary Principles and Practice for Legal Language Tubingeb Gunter Narr ISBN 3 8233 4533 8 Nielsen Sandro 2008 The Effect of Lexicographical Information Costs on Dictionary Making and Use Lexikos 18 170 189 ISSN 1684 4904 Atkins B T S amp Rundell Michael 2008 The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography Oxford Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 927771 1 Winchester Simon 1998 The Professor and the Madman A Tale of Murder Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary New York HarperPerennial ISBN 0 06 099486 X published in the UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne P G J van Sterkenburg ed 2003 A practical guide to lexicography John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN 978 1 58811 381 8 Further readingGuy Jean Forgue The Norm in American English Revue Francaise d Etudes Americaines Nov 1983 Vol 8 Issue 18 pp 451 461 An international appreciation of the importance of Webster s dictionaries in setting the norms of the English language External links Look up dictionary or wordbook in Wiktionary the free dictionary Dictionary at Curlie Glossary of dictionary terms by the Oxford University Press Texts on Wikisource Dictionary Collier s New Encyclopedia 1921 Dictionary Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th ed 1911 Dictionary New International Encyclopedia 1905 Wikisource Language directory of language related works on Wikisource includes dictionaries Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Dictionary amp oldid 1124621472, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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