Word Meaningissues (e.g., the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb or the
modification of unique);
f. (for learners’ dictionaries) the defining vocabulary, if a special
one is used;
g. (for learners’ dictionaries) the grammatical information included
and how it is presented;
h. who the publishers say the dictionaries are designed for. Discuss
the ways in which the dictionaries are or are not appropriate
for your purposes (e.g., for students you might imagine yourself
teaching);
i. the databases on which the dictionaries are based (e.g., are they
based on large, computerized, collections of texts? What kinds of
texts are included?).
Illustrate your review with appropriate examples from the dictionar-
ies. A very useful source of information and ideas on both native speaker
and learner dictionaries is Howard Jackson’s Words and their Meanings,
but there are many more books on lexicography worth reading for this
project.
- Imagine a class of students that you might reasonably expect to
teach. What criteria would you use to select a dictionary for the class-
room? To ask students to buy for themselves? For yourself?
Dictionaries are designed to provide readily accessible information about
the words of one or more languages. Many dictionaries provide far more
information than that. They may include lists of colleges and universities,
US presidents, the US constitution, and the like. While they may expand
their domains in certain respects, they may narrow them in others. Some
dictionaries are designed for college students and include words that the
editors believe are most relevant to that market segment (and we must never
forget that dictionaries are commercial products and that there is no such
thing as The Dictionary); other dictionaries are devoted to slang; still others
to technical fields such as medicine or linguistics (useful ones to comple-
ment this book would be Crystal’s A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics,
Matthews’ Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, and Johnson and John-
son’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics).
Other dictionaries are for people learning English (or some other lan-
guage) as a second or foreign language, like the Cambridge International
Dictionary (CIDE), Random House English Learner’s Dictionary, and Harp-