Blackwell Reference Online

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IntroductionAttempts by lexicographers to capture and give order to a language also affect its development. The three essays in Part III take up the abundance of glossaries, wordlists, dictionaries, and thesauri written to make sense of the semantic and lexical structure of English. In “Dictionaries Today” R. K. K. Hartmann offers an overview of the science of dictionary-making and of the challenges that face the modern lexicographer; Werner Hiillen's “English Onomasiological Dictionaries and Thesauri” provides a history of early attempts to order the lexicon; and Charlotte Brewer takes a closer look at the motivations behind three landmark modern English dictionaries in “Johnson, Webster, and the Oxford English Dictionary.”Dictionaries, Hüllen reminds us, have two primary semantic uses: to look up the meaning of an unknown word, or to find the right word to express an idea. The modern English speaker can choose from literally hundreds of dictionaries, from the smallest pocket speller to the heaviest unabridged tome, and the number will only swell as users turn increasingly to a growing number of electronic resources: spell-checkers, free online dictionaries, and user-created projects such as Wiktionary and the slang Urban Dictionary. Still, rarely do we feel the need to specify which dictionary we cite; we instead refer simply to the authority of “the dictionary.” But a dictionary's ... log in or subscribe to read full text