Dictionaries are probably the most ubiquitous of "traditional reference" resources; almost every home, library, and classroom has a dictionary. Dictionaries, however, have a relatively short history. In the West, they begin with the Accademia della Crusca's 1612 Vocabulario degli Accademici della crusca in Italian, the Academie Francaise's Le dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise (1694), and finally in English with Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656) and John Kersey's A New English Dictionary (1702; 28,000 words) and culminating in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755; 40,000 words; an interesting desciption with selected definitions is Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language from Stanford University; the preface to the dictionary is fascinating). The first dictionary produced in America was Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). Descriptive dictionaries have standardized spelling and described what words mean how they are used in the language; largely produced by national academies, they intended to "fix" language and protect it from "foreign" attacks. In Asia, the Kangxi Dictionary of 1710, was among the first non-Western dictionaries. Many dictionaries also provide information on pronunciation (provided a user can interpret the symbols) and syllabification (and hyphenation), parts of speech, and etymology for each word.
Prescriptive dictionaries, a type that has generally fallen out of favor since the end of World War II, attempt to fulfill a social function by advocating ("prescribing") standards for word usage along with the information found in descriptive dictionaries. Such dictionaries attempt to "prevent contamination of the language" posed by slang, jargon, and, for some languages (e.g., French), the incorporation of foreign words.
Unabridged dictionaries, like the Oxford English Dictionary, (for a history of the OED, see History of the Dictionary) attempt to include all words used in a language at a particular point in time. Editors of unabridged dictionaries clearly have an impossible task; in order to make it somewhat possible they generally do not include words that fail to domnstrate widespread acceptance. These unwieldy volumes can be enormously entertaining to logophiles, but general users find their bulk inconvenient. Abridged dictionaries, frequently based on unabridged dictionaries from the same publisher, are designed for a particular level of use (e.g., beginner's dictionaries, school dictionaries, high school dictionaries, and the widely used collegiate dictionaries). They contain 50,000 to 150,000 words on average, or about 16% of an unabridged dictionary.
Specialized dictionaries have developed to meet a variety of requirements:
- Slang dictionaries for informal words and idioms that are more metaphorical, colloquial, vivid, ephemeral, and occasionally vulgar; may be specialized to slang of a particular region (e.g., "'Strine"), ethnic group (e.g., "black English"), or occupation (e.g., soldiers and sailors).
- Dialect dictionaries, closely related to slang dictionaries, for regional variation in meaning and usage within a language.
- Bilingual dictionaries for home language (e.g., English) words and foreign language equivalents and vice versa.
- Thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms.
- Abbreviations and acronyms dictionaries.
- Reverse dictionaries for when a person knows the meaning but can't recall the word.
- Visual dictionaries for images of objects and their names (especially popular for beginning foreign language use).
- Character dictionaries are used for the Chinese language and Chinese characters used in written Japanese and Korean.
- Topical dictionaries for the meaning and use of words, especially technical terminology, in particular disciplines, occupations, or fields of study.
- Glossaries are the simplest of dictionaries; they are simply lists of words, most frequentl in a specialized field.
- Concordances are not dictionaries, although they are related to glossaries; they are lists of the words and their locations in a particular work or the works of a particular author.
1. Deborah Hammons' "How Spelling Came to Be," a "Home Forum" article from the 26 May 1998 edition of the Christian Science Monitor, provides a brief history of the development of English language dictionaries. Peter Erdmann and See-Young Cho's Brief History of English Lexicography provides a valuable timeline of dictionary development.
