

You may be smarter than a fifth grader…but what about an eleventh grader? Press “start” on this quiz to find out how many of these vocabulary words you already know. The compilation of a dictionary is lexicography lexicology is a branch of linguistics in which, with the utmost scientific rigour, the theories that lexicographers use in the solution of their problems are developed. Scholars in England sometimes use lexis to designate this lexical element of language. In this sense, a preliterate culture has a lexicon long before its units are written in a dictionary. The word lexicon designates a wordbook, but it also has a special abstract meaning among linguists, referring to the body of separable structural units of which the language is made up. A word list that consists of geographic names only is called a gazetteer. Theoretically, a good dictionary could be compiled by organizing into one list a large number of concordances.

When a word list is an index to a limited body of writing, with references to each passage, it is called a concordance. A short list, sometimes at the back of a book, is often called a glossary. The list may attempt to be a complete inventory of a language or may be only a small segment of it.

The word dictionary comes from the Latin dictio, “the act of speaking,” and dictionarius, “a collection of words.” Although encyclopaedias are a different type of reference work, some use the word dictionary in their names (e.g., biographical dictionaries).īasically, a dictionary lists a set of words with information about them. A dictionary may also provide quotations illustrating a word’s use, and these may be dated to show the earliest known uses of the word in specified senses. In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide information about their pronunciation, grammatical forms and functions, etymologies, syntactic peculiarities, variant spellings, and antonyms. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!ĭictionary, reference book that lists words in order-usually, for Western languages, alphabetical-and gives their meanings.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.
#Dictionaries for how to#
