Mila University Center

Department of English Tutor: A. A

1stYear LMD Students
Module: Techniques of university work
Lecture: Using Dictionary
1. Definition
A book or electronic resource that lists the words of a language (typically in alphabetical order) and
gives their meaning, or gives the equivalent words in a different language, often also providing
information about pronunciation, origin, and usage.
2. Synonyms :lexicon, wordbook, glossary, vocabulary list, vocabulary, word list, wordfinder.
3.Types: Dictionaries can be classified into different types on the basis of several criteria.
1. Number of languages:
a. monolingual (unilingual or explanatory)
b. translating (explain words by giving their equivalents in another language): bilingual or
multilingual .
2. Object of description
a. Linguistic (lexicons) describe the word as a language unit, its meaning, grammar,
orthographic, orthoepical and stylistic peculiarities are reflected.
b. Encyclopaedic contain information of extralinguistic character and give information on
all branches of knowledge. They deal not with words, but with facts and concepts.
3. Way of language unit description
a. General - contain multiaspect word description (e.g. explanatory dictionaries
 frequency dictionaries, i.e. lists of words, each of which is followed by a record
of its frequency of occurrence in one or several sets of reading matter (M. West’s
General Service List)
 a rhyming dictionary is also a general dictionary (McGill English Dictionary of
Rhyme with VersePerfect)
b. Special - reveal only some aspects of words or relations between them for example,
terminological dictionaries, phraseological dictionaries, dictionaries of slang, dictionaries
of synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, etc.
4. Selection of vocabulary (lexicon)
a. Special dictionaries in which principle of selection of lexis is presented according to
different criteria (e.g. dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, abbreviations,
terminological, dialectal, etc.)
b. Thesauruses dictionaries which lack principle of selection aiming at maximum fully
represented all the words of a language and their usage in texts (e.g. explanatory
dictionaries, frequent dictionaries, translating dictionaries, etc.)
c. Biographical dictionaries.
d. Etymological dictionaries (the word’s primary meaning; the immediate source of borrowing and
its origin)
5. Time
a. Diachronic dictionaries reflect the development of the English vocabulary by recording
the history of form and meaning for every word registered. E.g. OED “The Oxford English
Dictionary” NED “The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles”
b. The synchronic or descriptive dictionaries of current English concerned with present-day
meaning and usage of words. E.g. COD (the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English)
6. Coverage (the number of words being included into a dictionary)
A. large dictionaries(more then 80 000 words)
B. concise or middlesize dictionaries (70 000 - 80 000 words)
C. pocket or small- size dictionaries (up to 30 000 words)
7. Size: BIG, MIDDLE-SIZE, POCKET-SIZE.
8. Form: Books , CD-ROMS, Internet.

4. The use of dictionary: we use a dictionary to:

 find the meanings of words.
 find out the correct spelling of words.
 find out how to pronounce or say words.
 find out what part of speech a word is.
  to find the plural(s) of words.
5. What information can be found in a dictionary?
Whatever type of dictionary you use, it is worthwhile spending some time with the user’s guide,
i.e. the initial pages that explain what kind of information is provided in the dictionary, the layout of the
entries, and often also a legend that explains what the symbols used in the dictionary mean.
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.
2. Frequency information: symbols indicating how frequent the word is in spoken and written English.
In LDOCE the symbols are boxes with either an’S’ (spoken) or a ‘W’ (written) followed by a number.
For example, a box saying W2 means that the headword in question belongs to the second thousand
most common words in written English.
3. Pronunciation: phonetic script, given within parentheses ( ) or slash / / brackets, tells us how to
pronounce the word (the pronunciation of the word is transcribed following the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA)).
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.