Delahunty and Garvey
Dictionaries may provide separate, cross-referenced entries for separate
spellings of words, even where the meanings are identical. Usually only one
head word will be provided with a full entry. For example, WNWD has the
entries jehad and jihad, but the entry for jehad has a same as cross refer-
ence to jihad, where the full entry is given.
If both spellings and meanings have diverged, then alphabetization will
separate the entries, and any cross reference may be in the historical sec-
tion of the entry. Flower and flour were both spelled flour earlier in English,
and both derive from Latin flor- (“flower”). Flower means the blossom and
seed-producing parts of plants, but flour has specialized and now means the
ground “flower,” or best part of a grain, mainly of wheat. The separate spell-
ings usefully separate the meanings for us. Note, however, that flower and
flour are pronounced identically, so they are homophones.
If a single spelling has two or more quite unrelated meanings, then lexi-
cographers will typically assign a separate entry for each (set of) unrelated
meaning(s). WNWD distinguishes homographs by superscript numerals:
dam^1 1 a barrier built to hold back flowing water
dam^2 1 the female parent of any four-legged animal (WNWD p. 356)
Both homophones and homographs may be grouped together under the
term homonym.
Sense relations
So far we have looked at the overall organization of entries. Let’s now look
at how the meanings of words are expressed.
If the dictionary is not a bilingual one, then the definitions are expressed
in the same language as the headword, so there is a built-in circularity. For
example, the first sense of salt in WNWD is “sodium chloride,” (p. 1257)
and the definition WNWD gives for sodium chloride is “common salt” (p.
1352).
If you don’t know the words used in the definition, you can’t figure out
the meaning of the headword. English learners’ dictionaries attempt to deal
with this problem by using a defining vocabulary of words they assume to be
known to all or most high-beginner or intermediate learners of the language,
often the 2,000 most frequently used words of the language. CIDE uses sev-
eral criteria besides frequency in choosing words for its defining vocabulary:
the words must have the same meaning in both US and British English, be
easy for learners to understand, be up-to-date, not be easily confused with
other English words, not be easily confused with foreign words, and be useful