Dictionaries

General Special

Both bilingual and unilingual dictionaries can be general and special.

General dictionaries represent the vocabulary as a whole. E.g. the thirteen -volume Oxford English Dictionary. Some general dictionaries may have very specific aims and still considered general due to their coverage. They include, for instance, 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.

A rhyming dictionary is also a general dictionary, though arranged in inverse order, and so is a thesaurus in spite of its unusual arrangement.

Special dictionaries

Special dictionaries have the aim to cover only a certain specific part of the vocabulary. Special dictionaries may be further subdivided depending on whether the words are chosen according to

(1) the sphere of human activity in which they are used (e.g. technical dictionaries),

(2) the type of the units themselves (e. g. phraseological dictionaries),

(3) the relationships existing between them (e.g. dictionaries of synonyms).

The first subgroup embraces specialized dictionaries which register and explain technical terms for various branches of knowledge, art and trade: linguistic, medical, technical, economical terms, etc. Unilingual books of this type giving definitions of terms are called glossaries.

The second subgroup deals with specific language units, i.e. with phraseology, abbreviations, neologisms, borrowings, surnames, toponyms, proverbs and sayings. Phraseological dictionary is a type of reference work which lists fixed expressions, phrases or sentences.

The third subgroup contains synonymic dictionaries. Dictionaries recording the complete vocabulary of some author are called concordances. Concordance is an alphabetic index of the principal words in a book such as the Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare with a reference to the passage in which the word appears. It should be distinguished from those that deal only with difficult words, i.e. glossaries. To this group are also referred dialect dictionaries and dictionaries of Americanisms.

Dictionaries