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terminological, phraseological, dialectal word-books, dictionaries of new
words, of foreign words, of abbreviations, etc.
As to the information they provide all linguistic dictionaries fall into
those presenting a wide range of data, especially with regard to the ’se-
mantic aspect of the vocabulary items entered (they are called explanatory)
and those dealing with lexical units only in relation to some of their char-
acteristics, e.g. only in relation to their etymology or frequency or pronun-
ciation. These are termed specialised dictionaries.
Dictionaries with the same nature of word-lists may differ widely in the
kind of information they afford, and the other way round, dictionaries pro-
viding data of similar nature may have a different kind of word-list. For
example, dictionaries of u n r e s t r i c t e d word-lists may be quite
different in the type of information they contain (explanatory, pronounc-
ing, etymological, ideographic, etc.), terminological dictionaries can also
be explanatory, parallel, ideographic, presenting the frequency value of the
items entered, etc. On the other hand, translation dictionaries may be gen-
eral in their word-list, or terminological, phraseological, etc. Frequency
dictionaries may have general and terminological word-lists.
All types of dictionaries, save the translation ones, may be m о n o -
l i n g u a l
or b i l i n g u a l , i.e. the information about the items
entered may be given in the same language or in another one.
Care should be taken not to mix up the terms m o n o l i n g u a l
and e x p l a n a t o r y , on the one hand, and b i l i n g u a l and
t r a n s l a t i o n dictionaries on the other. The two pairs of terms re-
flect different dimensions of dictionaries. The terms m o n o l i n g u a l
and b i l i n g u a l * pertain to the language in which the information
about the words dealt with is couched. The terms e x p l a n a t o r y and
t r a n s l a t i o n dictionaries characterise the kind of information
itself.
Thus among dictionaries of th3 same type, say phraseological or termi-
nological, we may find both monolingual and bilingual word-books. For
example,
Kluge’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache
is
bilingual, but it is not its purpose to supply translation of the items entered.
It is important to realise that no dictionary, even the most general one,
can be a general-purpose word-book, each one pursues a certain aim, each
is designed for a certain set of users. Therefore the selection of material
and its presentation, the language in which it is couched depend very much
upon the supposed users, i.e. whether the dictionary is planned to serve
scholarly users or students or the general public.
Thus to characterise a dictionary one must qualify it at least from the
four angles mentioned above: 1) the nature of the word-list, 2) the infor-
mation supplied, 3) the language of the explanations, 4) the prospective
user.
Below we shall give a brief survey of the most important types of Eng-
lish dictionaries, both published in English-speaking countries and at
home. We shall first dwell on the dictionaries that are u n r e s t r i с t -
e d in their word-lists and general in the information they contain, —
212
on explanatory and translation dictionaries, — presented by the greatest
number of word-books, then deal with word-books of restricted word-lists
and with specialised dictionaries and after that with a special group of ref-
erence books, the so-called learner's dictionaries.
Out of the great abundance of linguistic dic-
tionaries of the English language a large group
is made up of the so-called e x p l a n a t o r y d i c t i o n a r i e s ,
1
big
and small, compiled in English-speaking countries. These dictionaries
provide information on all aspects of the lexical units entered: graphical,
phonetical, grammatical, semantic, stylistic, etymological, etc.
Most of these dictionaries deal with the form, usage and meaning of
lexical units in Modern English, regarding it as a stabilised system and
taking no account of its past development. They are synchronic in their
presentation of words as distinct from diachronic, those concerned with
the development of words occurring within the written history of the lan-
guage. For instance, the
New English Dictionary on Historical Principles
commonly abbreviated in
NED
and its abridgement
The Shorter Oxford
Dictionary on Historical Principles (SOD)
coyer the history of the English
vocabulary from the days of King Alfred down to the present time; they
are diachronic, whereas another abridgement of the
NED
— the
Concise
Oxford Dictionary of Current English (COD)
as well as H. C. Wyld's
Uni-
versal Dictionary of the English Language
are synchronic. Other series of
authoritative synchronic explanatory dictionaries are Webster dictionaries,
the Funk and Wagnalls (or Standard) dictionaries and the Century diction-
aries.
It should be noted that brief remarks of historical and etymological na-
ture inserted in dictionaries like the
COD
do not make them diachronic.
Moreover, dictionaries of a separate historical period, such as
Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary
by J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller,
Stratmann's Middle English
Dictionary
by H. Bradley, which are sometimes called historical, cannot
be strictly speaking referred to diachronic wordbooks. They do not trace
the evolution of the language, but study a synchronic c r o s s -
s e c t i o n , i.e. the words of a historical period are regarded from a syn-
chronic angle.
T r a n s l a t i o n
d i c t i o n a r i e s
(sometimes also called parallel) are wordbooks
containing vocabulary items in one language and their equivalents in an-
other language. Many English-Russian and Russian-English dictionaries
have been made in our country to meet the demands of language students
and those who use English in their work. The most representative transla-
tion dictionaries for English are the
New English-Russian Dictionary
ed-
ited by Prof. I. R. Galperin, the
English-Russian Dictionary
by Prof. V. K.
Müller and
The Russian-English Dictionary
under prof. A. I. Smirnitsky's
general direction.
1
It is common practice to call such word-books English-English dictionaries. But this
label cannot be accepted as a term for it only points out that the English words treated are
explained in the same language, which is typical not only of this type of dictionaries (cf.
synonym-books).
213
§ 3. Explanatory Dictionaries
§ 4. Translation Dictionaries
§ 5. Specialised Dictionaries
P h r a s e o l o g i c a l d i c t i o n a r i e s in England and America
have accumulated vast collections of idiomatic or colloquial phrases, prov-
erbs and other, usually image-bearing word-groups with profuse illustra-
tions. But the compilers’ approach is in most cases purely empiric. By
phraseology many of them mean all forms of linguistic anomalies which
transgress the laws of grammar or logic and which are approved by usage.
Therefore alongside set-phrases they enter free phrases and even separate
words.
1
The choice of items is arbitrary, based on intuition and not on any
objective criteria. Different meanings of polysemantic units are not singled
out, homonyms are not discriminated, no variant phrases are listed.
An Anglo-Russian Phraseological Dictionary
by A. V. Koonin pub-
lished in our country has many advantages over the reference books pub-
lished abroad and can be considered the first dictionary of English phrase-
ology proper. To ensure the highest possible cognitive value and quick
finding of necessary phrases the dictionary enters phrase variants and
structural synonyms, distinguishes between polysemantic and homonymic
phrases, shows word- and form-building abilities of phraseological units
and illustrates their use by quotations.
N e w W o r d s d i c t i o n a r i e s have it as their aim adequate
reflection of the continuous growth of the English language.
There are three dictionaries of neologisms for Modern English. Two of
these (Berg P.
A Dictionary of New Words in English,
1953; Reifer M.
Dictionary of New Words,
N. Y., 1955) came out in the middle of the 50s
and are somewhat out-of-date. The third
(A Dictionary of New English. A
Barnhart Dictionary,
L., 1973) is more up-to-date.
The Barnhart Dictionary of New English
covers words, phrases, mean-
ings and abbreviations which came into the vocabulary of the English lan-
guage during the period 1963 — 1972. The new items were collected from
the reading of over half a million running words from US, British and Ca-
nadian sources — newspapers, magazines and books.
D i c t i o n a r i e s of s l a n g contain elements from areas of sub-
standard speech such as vulgarisms, jargonisms, taboo words, curse-
words, colloquialisms, etc.
The most well-known dictionaries of the type are
Dictionary of Slang
and Unconventional English
by E. Partridge,
Dictionary of the Under-
world: British and American, The American Thesaurus of Slang
by L. V.
Berry & M. Den Bork,
The Dictionary of American Slang
by H. Wen-
tworth and S. B. Flexner.
U s a g e d i c t i o n a r i e s make it their business to pass judge-
ment on usage problems of all kinds, on what is right or wrong. Designed
for native speakers they supply much various information on such usage
problems as, e.g., the difference in meaning between words like
comedy,
farce and burlesque, illusion
and
delusion, formality
and formalism, the
proper pronunciation of words like
foyer, yolk, nonchalant,
the plural
forms of the nouns flamingo, radix,
1
E. g.
A Desk-Book of Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases
by F. N. Vizetelly and L. G. De
Bekker includes such words as
cinematograph, dear, (to) fly, halfbaked,
etc.
214
commander-in-chief,
the meaning of such foreign words as
quorum,
quadroon, quattrocento,
and of such archaic words as
yon
,
yclept
, and
so forth. They also explain what is meant by neologisms, archaisms, col-
loquial and slang words and how one is to handle them, etc.
The most widely used usage guide is the classic
Dictionary of Modern
English Usage
by N. W. Fowler. Based on it are
Usage and Abusage,
and
Guide to Good English
by E. Partridge,
A Dictionary of American English
Usage
by M. Nicholson, and others. Perhaps the best usage dictionary is
A
Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage
by B. Evans and C. Evans.
(N. Y., 1957).
D i c t i o n a r i e s of w o r d - f r e q u e n c y inform the user
as to the frequency of occurrence of lexical units in speech, to be more
exact in the “corpus of the reading matter or in the stretch of oral speech
on which the word-counts are based.
Most frequency dictionaries and tables of word frequencies published
in English-speaking countries were constructed to make up lists of words
considered suitable as the basis for teaching English as a foreign language,
the so-called basic vocabulary. Such are, e.g., the E. Throndike dictionar-
ies and M. West’s
General Service List.
Other frequency dictionaries were designed for spelling reforming, for
psycholinguistic studies, for an all-round synchronic analysis of modern
English, etc.
In the 50s — 70s there appeared a number of frequency dictionaries of
English made up by Soviet linguo-statisticians for the purposes of auto-
matic analysis of scientific and technical texts and for teaching-purposes
(in non-language institutions).
A R e v e r s e d i c t i o n a r y is a list of words in which the en-
try words are arranged in alphabetical order starting with their final letters.
The original aim of such dictionaries was to indicate words which form
rhymes (in those days the composition of verse was popular as a very deli-
cate pastime). It is for this reason that one of the most well-known reverse
dictionaries of the English language, that compiled by John Walker, is
called
Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language.
Nowadays the fields
of application of the dictionaries based on the reverse order (back-to-front
dictionaries) have become much wider. These word-books are indispensa-
ble for those studying the frequency and productivity of certain word-
forming elements and other problems of word-formation, since they re-
cord, in systematic and successive arrangement, all words with the same
suffixes and all compounds with the same terminal components. Teachers
of English and textbook compilers will find them useful for making vo-
cabulary exercises of various kinds. Those working in the fields of lan-
guage and information processing will be supplied with important initial
material for automatic translation and programmed instruction using com-
puters.
P r o n o u n c i n g d i c t i o n a r i e s record contemporary pro-
nunciation. As compared with the phonetic characteristics of words given
by other dictionaries the information provided by pronouncing dictionaries
is much more detailed: they indicate variant pronunciations
215
(which are numerous in some cases), as well as the pronunciation of dif-
ferent grammatical forms.
The world famous
English Pronouncing Dictionary
by Daniel Jones, is
considered to provide the most expert guidance on British English pronun-
ciation. The most popular dictionary for the American variant is
A Pro-
nouncing Dictionary of American English
by J. S. Kenyon and T. A.
Knott.
E t y m o l o g i c a l d i c t i o n a r i e s trace present-day words
to the oldest forms available, establish their primary meanings and give the
parent form reconstructed by means of the comparative-historical method.
In case of borrowings they point out the immediate source of borrowing,
its origin, and parallel forms in cognate languages.
The most authoritative of these is nowadays the newly-published
Ox-
ford Dictionary of English Etymology
edited by С. Т. Onions.
Quite popular is the famous
Etymological English Dictionary
by W. W.
Skeat compiled at the beginning of the century and published many times.
I d e o g r a p h i c d i c t i o n a r i e s designed for English-
speaking writers, orators or translators seeking to express their ideas ade-
quately contain words grouped by the concepts expressed.
The world famous ideographic dictionary of English is P. M. Roget’s
Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.
Besides the most important and widely used types of English dictionar-
ies discussed above there are some others, of which no account can be
taken in a brief treatment like this (such as synonym-books, spelling refer-
ence books, hard-words dictionaries, etc.).
SOME BASIC PROBLEMS OF DICTIONARY-
COMPILING
To get maximum efficiency from dictionaries, to secure all the infor-
mation afforded by them it is useful to have an insight into the experience
of lexicographers and some of the main problems underlying their work.
The work at a dictionary consists of the following main stages: the col-
lection of material, the selection of entries and their arrangement, the set-
ting of each entry.
At different stages of his work the lexicographer is confronted with dif-
ferent problems. Some of these refer to any type of dictionary, others are
specific of only some or even one type. The most important of the former
are 1) the selection of lexical units for inclusion, 2) their arrangement, 3)
the setting of the entries, 4) the selection and arrangement (grouping) of
word-meanings, 5) the definition of meanings, 6) illustrative material, 7)
supplementary material.
It would be a mistake to think that there are
big academic dictionaries that list everything
and that the shorter variants are mere quanti-
tative reductions from their basis. In reality only a dictionary of a dead
language or a certain historical period of a living language or a word-book
presenting the language of some author (called concordance) can be com-
plete as
216
§ 6. The Selection
of Lexical Units
for Inclusion