How to use a Dictionary as a Writer’s Language Tool? (16)

A dictionary is a reference book about words and as such it describes the functioning of individual words (sometimes called lexical items). It does so by listing these words in alphabetical order in the form of headwords, the words listed as entries in the dictionary

Typical comprehension uses are:

  • Looking up unknown words that are encountered when listening
    or reading
     
  • Confirming the meanings of partially known words
     
  • Conforming guesses from context

 

Typical production  uses are:

  • Looking up unknown words needed to speak or write
     
  • Looking up spelling, pronunciation, meaning, grammar, constraints
    on use, collocations, inflections and derived forms of partly known
    words.
  • Confirming the spelling, pronunciation, meaning etc. of known words.
     
  • Checking that a word actually exists
     
  • Finding a different word to use instead of a known one (a
     synonym)
     
  • Correcting errors and mistakes

  • 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.

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