Blackwell Reference Online

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A reference book which lists the words of one, two or more languages providing information about their meaning, usage, pronunciation, spelling, parts of speech and history. The monolingual dictionary, which uses one language as a closed system where every definition refers back to itself, is a modern invention, but embryonic dictionaries and bilingual word lists were already compiled 5,000 years ago on Sumerian clay tablets. Word lists, the core of all dictionaries, are the prototypical example of decontextualized speech. Their objects are words rather than communicative units of language. In a list, words are isolated from their communicative context. They can be ordered on purely formal grounds and inspected with regard to formal properties. Dictionaries are the pre-eminent example of text genres which came into existence as a consequence of writing. The internal organization of every dictionary depends on the structure of the writing system used for recording the language(s) in question. The alphabet is a powerful conceptual ordering system which determines the place of a word in a dictionary. In English, for example, words are arranged by their graphemes. As a result homophonous words often show up in very different places in the dictionary (e.g. filter and philtre ). Other writing systems impose different ordering principles on the organization of dictionaries and hence, ... log in or subscribe to read full text