What do dictionaries contain

Macmillan Dictionary contains a great deal of useful information about words and phrases — information that sometimes can be difficult to navigate. On this page we provide answers to some of the frequently asked questions about what a dictionary entry includes.

If there are any terms you are not familiar with, you might find our Glossary of Dictionary Terms helpful. A typical entry in Macmillan Dictionary consists of: a headword [1] , which is shown in either black or red at the top of the entry; information about the word's meaning or meanings, called definition s [2].

At the top of the entry you can see the number of definitions [3] listed; information about the word's grammatical behaviour: word class [4] and any other relevant grammatical information. At the top of the entry there is an icon for the headword's spoken pronunciation [5] as well as the phonetic transcription of the word's pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA symbols [6].

This information is not provided for phrasal verbs, phrases, and entries that are added to the crowdsourced Open Dictionary e. Compouns will often have recorded pronunciations but not IPA transcriptions because those can be looked up separately at the contributing parts of the headword. The word's inflections can be seen by opening the 'Word Forms' [7] box.

When a headword is shown in red, next to it you will find information about how frequent the word is, in the form of red stars [8]. The Red Words and Stars page provides more detailed information about word frequency in Macmillan Dictionary.

If a word has more than one meaning, these are shown in separate numbered senses [9]. Meanings that are very closely related to the main meaning are shown in subsenses [10] see further down the page for this so that the connection is clear. Some entries contain derived words [11]. These are words related to the headword whose meaning is clear enough not to need a definition. These are found at the bottom of the entry. Words that have five or more meanings will also include very brief definitions at the top of the page, with links to the relevant senses.

These 'menus' can help identify the meaning you need for understanding a word in a particular context, as well as help navigate to the correct part of the entry to find more detailed information.

Commonly confused words. Differences between British and American spelling. Focus on vocabulary. Vocabulary awareness. Useful words and phrases. Using abbreviations. Register and style. Register types. Formal vs. General information on dictionary use. Online dictionary resources. Corpora - resources for writer autonomy. What is a corpus? Examples of the usefulness of a corpus. Using the World Wide Web as a corpus. Online corpus resources. Different kinds of sources. The functions of references.

How to give references. Reference accuracy. Reference management tools. Using a reference style. Different kinds of reference styles. Style format. Elements of the reference list. Quick guides to reference styles.

Documentary note style. Writing acknowledgements. Academic integrity. What is academic integrity? Academic integrity and writing. Academic integrity at LU. Different kinds of plagiarism. Avoiding plagiarism. LU glossary. English-Swedish LU Glossary. Svensk-engelsk LU-ordlista. About Awelu. Start Language Dictionaries General information on dictionary use.

A dictionary is a reference book about words and as such it describes the functioning of individual words sometimes called lexical items. It does so by listing these words in alphabetical order in the form of headwords, the words listed as entries in the dictionary. Even though this section focuses on dictionaries, it will be useful initially to distinguish between a dictionary , an encyclopedia and a thesaurus. Both a dictionary and an encyclopedia are reference works, but whereas an encyclopedia conveys knowledge about the world as we know it e.

A further distinction can be made between a dictionary and a thesaurus, where the latter can be seen as a word book which is structured around lexical items of a language according to sense relations, most notably synonomy words having the same or very similar meanings Kirkness, Click on the link below to access the online version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: Encyclopaedia Britannica. One distinction that can be made is that between dictionaries that deal with one single language and those that deal with several languages.

Firstly, a dictionary that deals only with one language is called a monolingual dictionary. Secondly, a dictionary that deals with two languages e. English-Swedish is called a bilingual dictionary.

For example, Norstedts Stora Svensk-Engelska Ordbok Norstedts, presents headwords in Swedish, whereas meanings translation equivalents are given in English.

Example sentences are often given in both languages. Thirdly, a dictionary that deals with more than two languages is called a multilingual dictionary. All these types of dictionary can furthermore be divided into general or specialised dictionaries. The general dictionaries, as the name implies, deal with the more general side of one or several languages. For example, Norstedts Stora Engelsk-Svenska Ordbok Norstedts, is aimed a covering some , of the most commonly occurring words of English.

A specialized dictionary, on the other hand, focuses on a more narrow and specialized part of a language, for example the words used in engineering, medicine, aviation, experimental psychology, etc. The specialized dictionary is thus typically a subject-specific technical dictionary, but other types exist too, e.

Even though dictionaries can be used for many different purposes, a useful distinction that can be made is that between comprehension decoding and production encoding purposes. Nation provides the following lists of typical uses: Typical comprehension uses are: Looking up unknown words that are encountered when listening or reading Confirming the meanings of partially known words Conforming guesses from context Typical production uses are: Looking up unknown words needed to speak or write Looking up spelling, pronunciation, meaning, grammar, constraints on use, collocations, inflections and derived forms of partly known words.

Confirming the spelling, pronunciation, meaning etc. Checking that a word actually exists Finding a different word to use instead of a known one a synonym Correcting errors and mistakes Since this website is dedicated to academic writing, it will make sense to take a closer look at the process involved in production encoding of written language and the dictionary use typically needed in this process.

In terms of what type of information is given in a typical entry, here is an example of what is normally found in a mono-lingual dictionary here based on the structure in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English LDOCE : 1.

Spelling : the headword itself is given in its normal spelling, printed in bold. Headwords are arranged alphabetically in a dictionary. Frequency information : symbols indicating how frequent the word is in spoken and written English. For example, a box saying W2 means that the headword in question belongs to the second thousand most common words in written English.

Word class : the word class also called part-of-speech of the word and other grammatical information is provided following conventional abbreviations, such as n for Noun and v for Verb.

Sense s : when a word has more than one meaning, then the different senses are numbered. When a sense or a group of senses belong to a different word class, this is indicated. For each sense, a definition is given which at the same time also functions as an explanation of its meaning.

Collocations, phrasal use and the syntactic operation of the word : examples are given of how the headword may be combined with other words to form idiomatic language usage. Naturally, dictionaries differ in terms of what information is provided and in what order, but the above example typically illustrates what types of information are included in an English Foreign Language EFL dictionary entry.

As was stated above, it is worthwhile spending some time with the initial pages of a dictionary, where the entry structure and its symbols are explained. All the senses of a word that are listed are equal, and not in a George-Orwellesque all-words-are-equal-but-some-are-more-equal-than-others sort of way. Many people conflate grammar and usage , and while there may be some overlap between the treatment of these two subjects in a dictionary, lexicographers tend to distinguish between them.

Dictionary makers also tend to be not nearly as concerned with grammar as people think they should be an impression that is based on the letters people send to us. The reason that we include a definition for that sense of literally that makes your eyeballs hurt has nothing to do with grammar. It has to do with usage. The question of whether the genitive apostrophe came about as a result of English shifting away from being a heavily inflectional language in which this punctuation mark stood in for certain now-discarded case endings or whether it served as a substitution for part of the word his is an issue that might be referred to as grammatical, but literally is just a word that has taken on multiple meanings.

Since dictionaries serve as catalogs of the language they will often also deal with issues relating to grammar. However, these tend to be grammatical issues that have some bearing on the meaning of a word, rather than grammatical issues such as sentence structure.

Perhaps because they tend to be rather large books there is frequently an assumption that most dictionaries contain all the words in the language. There has never been, and never will be, a dictionary that includes all the words in English. Some words are omitted because they are obsolete, and others are left out because they are not germane to anyone but a specialist dictionaries tend to not define all of the known chemical compounds, for instance.

The great 18th century lexicographer Samuel Johnson said and wrote many witty things about dictionaries and the people who make them.

Among these witticisms was "Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. The science of horology has changed a considerable amount since Johnson wrote these words, as has the art of lexicography. Yet there is one constant theme in dictionaries from then until now: they are all out of date by the day they are published. This is both inevitable and not a bad thing.

Lexicographers rely on data, rather than gut feelings, when deciding which words will be entered and defined. Were dictionaries to be entirely up to date on all the newest words and phrases they would have to enter these as soon as they began being used, leading to reference works glutted with a profusion of coinages and evanescent slang, most of which will likely not be in use five years from now.

That would be the one in which the forces of darkness and ignorance have surrounded the noble and virtuous English language and are attempting to murder it with semantic drift. The technical term for this kind of argument is piffle. There is no fight. The English language is not under siege. It is not broken and does not need fixing. Dictionaries are not abdicating their position as defenders of the language if only because they never had this position in the first place.