Types of dictionaries

Definition

A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon.

According to Nielsen (2008) a dictionary may be regarded as a lexicographical product that is characterised by three significant features: (1) it has been prepared for one or more functions; (2) it contains data that have been selected for the purpose of fulfilling those functions; and (3) its lexicographic structures link and establish relationships between the data so that they can meet the needs of users and fulfill the functions of the dictionary.

· History

The first recorded form of dictionary much to the surprise of many is dated back to the 7th century BC. It is interesting to note that the concept of dictionary was conceived in  7th century BC. This first dictionary belongs to the library of the Ashurbanipal, the king of Assyria, Nineveh. As one can expect the dictionary was not a paperback!!! It was clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions. Followed by this in terms of chronology was the Latin dictionary by Verrius Flaccus. Though we are unable to exactly place this dictionary in time line, it was opined by the scholars that it must have been written around 3rd or 2nd century BC.   The evidence of next available dictionary takes a leap to 5th century AD and later. These dictionaries take a big leap not only in terms of chronology but, it also takes big leap in terms of Geographical location. The 5th AD century dictionaries are Sanskrit dictionaries. These are polyglot dictionaries in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian and Chinese. During this time were also found dictionaries in botany, astronomy and medicine in Sanskrit.  Following these, were dictionaries in Hebrew between 6th to 8th centuries AD.

How about the sophisticated Greeks and Romans? Did their sophisticated minds not conceive anything on collection and listing of the words of their language? The Greeks had something similar to glossaries of unusual words and phrases rather than a comprehensive and exhaustive collection of words of their language.   The need for bilingual and multilingual dictionaries was realized at a greater magnitude with the advent of mass movement of people enabled by trade and commerce – there was a growing need to learn and master foreign languages. One such bilingual dictionary dates back to 1502 AD, it was initially compiled by an Italian monk by name Ambrogio Calpeno. This work was later extended to incorporate Italian, French and Spanish. The same work grew to become a massive work that had a collection of eleven languages in 1590.   After this period there was a huge explosion on the number and availability of dictionaries. It is difficult to keep track of the outburst of dictionaries and list them all after this period.

English Dictionaries

The earliest dictionaries in the English language were glossaries of French, Italian or Latin words along with definitions of the foreign words in English. An early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie created by Richard Mulcaster in 1592. The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Yet this early effort, as well as 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."  It was not until Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that a truly noteworthy, reliable English Dictionary was deemed to have been produced, and the fact that today many people still mistakenly believe Johnson to have written the first English Dictionary is a testimony to this legacy. 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. 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. It took nearly 50 years to finally complete the huge work, and they finally released the complete OED in twelve volumes in 1928. It remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day, with revisions and updates added by a dedicated team every three months. One of the main contributors to this modern day dictionary was an ex-army surgeon, William Chester Minor, a convicted murderer who was confined to an asylum for the criminally insane.

American Dictionaries

In 1806, American Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. 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 hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the country used different languages. They also spelled, pronounced, and used English words differently. 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 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. 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. Austin (2005) explores the intersection of lexicographical and poetic practices in American literature, and attempts to map out a "lexical poetics" using Webster's definitions as his base. He explores how American poets used Webster's dictionaries, often drawing upon his lexicography in order to express their word play. Austin explicates key definitions from both the Compendious (1806) and American (1828) dictionaries, and brings into its discourse a range of concerns, including the politics of American English, the question of national identity and culture in the early moments of American independence, and the poetics of citation and of definition. Austin concludes that Webster's dictionaries helped redefine Americanism in an era of an emergent and unstable American political and cultural identity. Webster himself saw the dictionaries as a nationalizing device to separate America from Britain, calling his project a "federal language", with competing forces towards regularity on the one hand and innovation on the other. Austin suggests that the contradictions of Webster's lexicography were part of a larger play between liberty and order within American intellectual discourse, with some pulled toward Europe and the past, and others pulled toward America and the new future. For an international appreciation of the importance of Webster's dictionaries in setting the norms of the English language, see Forque (1982).

Types:

General dictionaries 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.

The general dictionaries are of two types:  (a) Academic or normative dictionary, (b) Referential or overall descriptive dictionary.

The academic dictionary gives the lexical stock of the standard language. The aim of this dictionary is to present the language as it is expected to be and stop it from decay. It has an eye on the future usage of the language. The selection of entries is done from the works of the creative writers, may be both earlier and contemporary, literature of science, arts etc., newspapers, magazines and other materials which are considered representative of the standard language. These dictionaries do not contain words of local or regional variation. Such words are included in the dictionaries only when they have been used by some writers and have been standardized in the language. Archaic and obsolete words used by creative writers are also included in them. The whole data in the dictionary represents a self contained and homogenous system. The chief feature of such dictionaries is their inclusion of profuse illustrative examples form the corpus with or without citations. Different types of dictionaries including dictionaries of technical terms, grammatical dictionary, the spelling dictionary etc., come under this group. The referential or overall descriptive dictionary does not have any normative aim. The word stock of this dictionary is selected from different heterogeneous speech groups. The corpus includes not only literary texts but also oral literature. It contains words of regional, social and stylistic variations.

Specialized dictionaries

According to the Manual of Specialized Lexicographies a specialized dictionary (also referred to as a technical dictionary) is a lexicon that focuses upon a specific subject field. 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), a sub-field dictionary covers a singular 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 above 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) whereas single-field and sub-field dictionaries tend to maximize coverage within a limited subject field (The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology).

Different types of specialized dictionaries  Dictionary of Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Ranging fromplurals and literary technique to the distinctions among like words (homonyms, synonyms, etc.), to the use of foreign terms, it became the standard for most style guides that followed; thus, the 1926 first edition remains in print despite the existence of the 1965 second edition, and the 1996 and 2004 printings of the third edition, which was mostly rewritten as a usage dictionary incorporating corpus linguistics data.To its users, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is informally known by the namesFowler’s Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler’s.

Thesaurus is a reference work that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning (containing synonyms and sometimes antonyms), in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions andpronunciations. The largest thesaurus in the world is the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains more than 920,000 entries.

Dictionary of Slang 

is a reference book containing an alphabetical list of slang, vernacular vocabulary not generally acceptable in formal usage, usually including information given for each word, including meaning, pronunciation, and etymology. It can provide definitions on a range of slang from more mundane terms (like "rain check" or "bob and weave") to obscure sexual practices. Such works also can include words and phrases arising from different dialects and argots, which may or may not have passed into more common usage. They can also track the changing meaning of the terms over time and space, as they migrate and mutate. This makes them of interest to a variety of people, from oral historians, to etymologists, to the casual browser.

Visual Dictionaries

is a dictionary that primarily uses pictures to illustrate the meaning of words. Visual dictionaries are often organized by themes, instead of being an alphabetical list of words. For each theme, an image is labeled with the correct word to identify each component of the item in question. Visual dictionaries can be monolingual or multilingual, providing the names of items in several languages. An index of all defined words is usually included to assist finding the correct illustration that defines the word.

Rhyming dictionary

A rhyming dictionary is a specialist dictionary designed for use in writing poetry and lyrics. In a rhyming dictionary, words are categorized into equivalence classes that consist of words which rhyme with one another. They will also typically support several different kinds of rhymes, and possibly also alliteration as well. Because rhyming dictionaries are based on pronunciation, they are difficult to compile. Words and rhyming patterns change their pronunciation over time and between dialects. Rhyming dictionaries for Old English,Elizabethan poetry, or Standard English would have quite different content. As rhyming dictionaries arrange the whole language according to its word terminations, they can be useful in solving crossword puzzles.

Monolingual dictionaries

is a type of dictionary designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language. MLDs are based on the premise that language-learners should progress from a bilingual dictionary to a monolingual one as they become more proficient in their target language, but that general-purpose dictionaries (aimed at native speakers) are inappropriate for their needs. Dictionaries for learners include a great deal of information on grammar, usage, common errors, collocation, and pragmatics, which is largely missing from standard dictionaries because native speakers tend to know these aspects of language intuitively. And while the definitions in standard dictionaries are often written in difficult language, those in a monolingual learner’s dictionary aim to be simple and accessible. Monolingual learner's dictionaries have been produced for learners of several languages, including German, Spanish, Dutch, and Chinese. But most of the activity in this field is in the area of dictionaries for people learning English. The first English MLD, published in 1935, was the New Method English Dictionary by Michael West and James Endicott, a small dictionary using a restricted defining vocabulary of just 1490 words. Since the end of World War Two, the MLD has been a publishing phenomenon, with global sales running into tens of millions of copies, reflecting the boom in the English language teaching industry. Probably the best-known English monolingual dictionary for advanced learners is the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. now in its eighth edition. It was originally published in Japan in 1942 as The Idiomatic and Syntactic Dictionary of English, written by A. S. Hornby and two collaborators. It was subsequently republished as A Learner's Dictionary of Current English in 1948, before acquiring its current name. Other publishers gradually entered the market. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English was published in 1978, and its most striking feature was the use of a restricted defining vocabulary, which is now a standard feature of learners' dictionaries. There are currently six major MLDs for advanced learners. In addition to the Oxford and Longman dictionaries, these are: Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, first published in 1987 Cambridge International Dictionary of English, 1995 Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, 2002 Merriam-Webster Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, 2008 Monolingual learner's dictionaries have been the subject of a great deal of scholarly work, and the standard book on the subject is Cowie 1999. Since the 1980s, the English MLD has, arguably, been the most innovative area in the field of lexicography, in terms of both the way dictionaries are written and the aspects of language which dictionaries describe. Notable advances include: § the use of corpora as a basis for language description, a radical innovation which was introduced by the COBUILD project in the 1980s and is now standard practice in lexicography § the use of intelligent software for extracting information from corpora and for automating the dictionary-making process § detailed information about collocation, such as the ‘collocation boxes’ in the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, which give lists of high-frequency collocates, identified using ‘Word Sketch’ software  § the use of digital media: MLDs were among the first dictionaries to appear on CD-ROM, with the Longman Interactive English Dictionary leading the way in 1993. More recently several MLDs have become available in free online versions, among them the Merriam-Webster Advanced Learner's English Dictionary and the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners Monolingual learner's dictionaries have also been the subject of a great deal of research into how people use dictionaries, and are probably the most intensively-studied type of dictionary.

Bidirectional bilingual dictionaries

usually consist of two sections, each listing words and phrases of one language alphabetically along with their translation. In addition to the translation, a bilingual dictionary usually indicates the part of speech, gender, verb type, declension model and other grammatical clues to help a non-native speaker use the word. Other features sometimes present in bilingual dictionaries are lists of phrases, usage and style guides, verb tables, maps and grammar references. In contrast to the bilingual dictionary, a monolingual dictionary defines words and phrases instead of translating them.

Glossaries

Another variant is the glossary, an alphabetical list of defined terms in a specialised field, such as medicine or science. 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.