Classification of linguistic dictionaries

1. According to the scope of their word-list dictionaries are divided into general and restricted.

General dictionaries represent the vocabulary as a whole with a degree of completeness depending upon the scope and the bulk of the book in question. Some general dictionaries may have very specific aims and still be considered general due to their coverage. They include:

- explanatory dictionaries, e.g. the Shorter Oxford Dictionary,the New Random House Dictionary, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary;

- bilingual dictionaries, e.g. the Oxford Russian English dictionary;

- pronouncing dictionaries which record only pronunciation, e.g. the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary by D. Jones;

- spelling dictionaries, e.g. Maxwell C. The Pergamon Oxford Dictionary of Perfect Spelling;

- frequency dictionaries, e.g. the Dictionary of Frequency Value of Combinability of words, Thorndike E.S., Lorge I. The Teacher’s Book of 30. 000 words, West M. A General Service List of English Words;

- rhyming dictionaries (apple should be looked up at letter e), e.g. the Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language;

- thesauri, e.g. the Collins COBUILD Thesaurus.

Restricted dictionaries cover only a certain specific part of the vocabulary. Restricted dictionaries can be subdivided depending on whether the words are chosen according to the sphere of human activity in which they are used, the type of units themselves or the relations existing between them.

According to the sphere of human activity in which they are used there are numerous dictionaries who explain terms for various branches of knowledge (medical, linguistic, economic terms, etc.), e.g. Современный англо-русский политехнический словарь (ред. А.Е. Чернухин), Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law.

According to the type of units themselves there are dictionaries who deal with specific language units such as neologisms, slang, abbreviations, phraseological units, borrowings, toponyms, dialectal words, maxims and quotations, and others, e.g. the Longman Register of New Words, the Bloomsury Dictionary of New Words, NTC’s Dictionary of American Slang by R. Spears, the English Dialect Dictionary by J. Wright, the English phraseological Dictionary by A.V. Koonin (in two volumes), the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, Collin’s Book of English Idioms, Прошина З.Г. Перекресток: контактологический словарь.

According to the relations existing between language units there are dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms, e.g. the Dictionary of English Synonyms and Synonymous Expressions by R. Soule, Webster’s Dictionary of synonyms.

2. According to the information they provide all linguistic dictionaries fall into explanatory and specialized.

Explanatory dictionaries present a wide range of data: spelling, transcription, grammatical forms, meanings, examples, derivatives, phraseology, etymology, synonyms and antonyms, e.g. the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the Collins COBUILD Essential English dictionary. Learner’s dictionaries of this type are designed as an aid to various users both native and foreign, studying a language from various angles and at different stages of advancement, e.g. the Cambridge English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.

Specialized (special) dictionaries provide the information limited to one particular linguistic aspect of the word, i.e. etymology, frequency, pronunciation, usage, e.g.Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, the Dictionary of English Style by A. Reum, the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English edited by M. Benson, E. Benson, R. Ilson, the Longman Anagram Dictionary, the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, Maxwell C. The Pergamon Oxford Dictionary of Perfect Spelling, Bernstein T. Bernstein’s Reverse Dictionary,Reader’s Digest Reverse Dictionary.

3. According to the language of explanations all dictionaries are divided into monolingual, bilingual and multilingual.

Monolingual dictionaries provide information about the word in the same language, e.g. Hornby A.S. The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, Collins Cobuild Thesaurus.

Bilingual (translation, parallel) dictionaries explain words by giving their equivalents in another language, e.g. the English-Russian dictionary by V. Muller, Новый Большой англо-русский словарь: в 3-х т. / Под ред. Ю.Д. Апресяна.

Multilingual (polyglot) dictionaries provide information about the word in several languages, e.g. ABBYY Lingvo x 3.

4. With regard to time dictionaries fall into synchronic and diachronic.

Synchronic (descriptive) dictionaries are concerned with the present-day meaning and usage of words, e.g. the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.

Diachronic (historical) dictionaries reflect the development of the English vocabulary by recording the history of form and meaning for every word registered, e.g. the Oxford English Dictionary, Bosworth J., Toller T.N. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Stratmann’s Middle English Dictionary,the Online Etymology Dictionary www.etymonline.com.

5. According to their form dictionaries can be conventional and electronic.

Conventional dictionaries are traditional paper word-books, e.g. Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.

Electronic dictionaries use multimedia means, their greatest advantage is high speed of the search. There two main types of them: CD-ROM dictionaries and on-line dictionaries.

Among the CD-ROM dictionaries there are the following: the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners,the Oxford English Dictionary for Advanced Learner’s, ABBYY Lingvo x 13 and many others. For example, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English provides American and British pronunciation, gives word origins, indicates at the word frequency, contains 7000 encyclopedic entries for people, places, and things, taken from the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture, a corpus of examples from modern mass media (the Examples Bank), offers grammar and word usage assignments (the Activator section), one can record his/her voice and compare his/her pronunciation with the dictionary pronunciation. See the dictionary interface screenshot below.

Screenshot 1.

The dictionary ABBYY Lingvo x 3 is of great interest as well. It combines data of more than 150 dictionaries and contains 8.7 million entries, supports 107 thematic dictionaries of different fields of science and business, 12 updated dictionaries of present-day vocabulary embracing words and phrases which have entered speech of late two years, and is one of the most comprehensive modern dictionaries. ABBYY Lingvo x 3 links up with the world famous wordbooks Oxford Dictionary of English, New Oxford American Dictionary and Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary. The dictionary also supplies a detailed translation with examples how to use the word, shows transcription and synonyms and provides special facilities for language learners. The interface of this language is shown on Screenshot 2 below.

Screenshot 2.

Among the on-line dictionaries there are the following: the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the Cambridge Dictionaries Online, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, www.multitran.ru, online.multilex.ru, thesaurus.com, etc. All major publishing houses such as Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, Longman, Chambers, Merriam Webster, Funk & Wagnals and others have their web sites, on-line dictionaries being presented there. The access for many on-line dictionaries is fee-paying.

The Oxford English Dictionary Online, for instance, contains the material of the 20-volume the Oxford English Dictionary and 3-volume Additional Series. Besides more revised and new entries are added to the online dictionary every quarter. The Oxford English Dictionary Online is characterized by the following main features: 1) the display of entries according to a user’s needs, i.e. entries can be displayed by turning pronunciations, etymologies, variant spelling, and quotations on and off; 2) the search for pronunciations as well as accented and other special characters; 3) the search for words which have come into English via a particular language; 4) the search for quotations from a specific year, or from a particular author and/or work; 5) the search for a term when a user knows only meaning; 6) the use of wildcats “?” and “*” if a user is unsure of a spelling; 7) the restrictions of a search to a previous results set; 8) the search for first cited date, authors, and works; 9) the case-sensitive searches; and some others.