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Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition by Merriam-Webster

Black's Law Dictionary by Bryan A. Garner

Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms by John Downes

Easy Spanish Phrase Book: Over 770 Basic Phrases for Everyday Use by Dover

The American Heritage Picture Dictionary by Editors of The American Heritage Dictionaries

1001 Most Useful Spanish Words by Seymour Resnick

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

The Merriam Webster Dictionary by Merriam Webster

The New Food Lover's Companion: Comprehensive Definitions of Nearly 6000 Food, Drink, and Culinary Terms (Barron's Cooking Guide) by Sharon Tyler Herbst

The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Third Edition) by Merriam-Webster

501 Spanish Verbs by Ph.D Christopher Kendris

Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary by Donald Venes

Rick Steves' Italian Phrase Book and Dictionary by Rick Steves

The American Heritage Student Thesaurus by Paul Hellweg

Merriam-Webster's Spanish-English Dictionary by Merriam-Webster


Dictionary

for other uses of "dictionary", see dictionary (disambiguation) A dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with its glyph or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. Many dictionaries also provide pronunciation information, word derivations, histories, or etymologies, illustrations, usage guidance, and examples in sentences. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Word order 2 Special-purpose dictionaries 2.1 Bilingual dictionaries 2.2 Character dictionaries 2.3 Glossaries 3 Variations between dictionaries 3.1 Prescription and Description 3.2 Other variations 4 History 5 Miscellanea 6 List of major dictionaries 6.1 English 6.2 Japanese 6.3 Chinese 6.4 Publishers 7 List of online dictionaries 8 List of collaborative dictionaries 9 Further reading 10 Related articles Word order Dictionaries of alphabetic languages list words in alphabetical order. With non-alphabetic languages, it may be different. The order in a dictionary with ideographic entries such as Chinese character is often troublesome and controversial because each character has different readings. Collation systems for logographs do exist. In Japanese and Korean, words containing Chinese characters (called Kanji in Japanese and Hanja in Korean) can be spelled in Hiragana and Hangul respectively, and so are inserted in their proper alphabetical order in dictionaries, alongside words not derived from Chinese characters. Furthermore, in entries for words derived from characters, the main entry words are spelled in Hiragana (for Japanese dictionaries) and Hangul (for Korean dictionaries), with the Chinese characters inserted in parentheses after each entry word. Special-purpose dictionaries There are different types of dictionaries, including bilingual, multilingual, historical, biographical, and geographical dictionaries. Bilingual dictionaries In bilingual dictionaries, each entry has translations of words in other language. For example, in a Japanese-English dictionary, the entry tsuki has the corresponding English word, moon. In dictionaries between a language using a non-Roman script and English, entry words in the non-English language may either be printed and sorted in the native order, or romanized and sorted in Roman alphabetical order. Character dictionaries In East-Asian languages, a dictionary specialized in Han (Chinese) characters has developed, called Kan-wa jiten (lit Han-Japanese dictionary) in Japanese and Okpyeon (literally, "Jewel Book") in Korean. Each entry has one Chinese character with the description about strokes, reading and a list of words using that character. Glossaries Another variant is the glossary, an alphabetical list of defined terms in a specialized field, such as medicine or science. The simplest dictionary, a defining dictionary, provides a core glossary of the simplest meanings of the simplest concepts. From these, other concepts can be explained and defined, in particular for those who are first learning a language. In English the commercial defining dictionaries typically include only one or two meanings of under 2000 words. With these, the rest of English, and even the 4000 most common English idioms and metaphors, can be defined. Variations between dictionaries Prescription and Description Dictionaries come in two basic philosophies, prescriptive and descriptive. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is descriptive, and attempts to describe actual usage. Noah Webster, on the other hand, who was intent on forging a distinct identity for the American language changed the meanings and pronunciation of numerous words. This is the reason that American English has the spelling "color" while British English has the spelling "colour". (See American and British English differences.) Most modern dictionaries are descriptive, although many, such as the American Heritage dictionaries make extensive efforts to provide information on the best usage, and almost all dictionaries provide some information on words considered erroneous, vulgar, or easily confused. In any case, in the long run, usage alone determines the meaning of words, although dictionaries provide conservative continuity, even the most descriptive. Other variations Since words and their meanings develop over time, dictionary entries are organized to reflect these changes. Dictionaries may either list meanings in the historical order in which they appeared, or may list meanings in order of popularity and most common use. Dictionaries also differ in the degree to which they are encyclopedic, providing considerable background information, illustrations, and the like, or linguistic, concentrating on etymology, nuances of meaning, and quotations demonstrating usage. History The art and craft of writing dictionaries is called lexicography. The first large English dictionary was Thomas Blount's of 1656. This was followed by Samuel Johnson's famous and more comprehensive dictionary of 1755. Noah Webster's dictionary was published by the G&C Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts which still publishes Merriam-Webster dictionaries, but the term Webster's is considered generic and can be used by any dictionary. Miscellanea The Irish mathematical physicist, J. L. Synge, created a game, Game of Circ, to emphasize the circular reasoning implicit in the defining process of any standard dictionary. List of major dictionaries English Japanese Chinese Publishers List of online dictionaries
  • Online versions of printed dictionaries
  • Online-only general dictionaries
    • Picture Dictionary Online Picture Dictionary with search function. Uses pictures and symbols from Universal Picture Language. Grasp the meaning of a word with just a glance at its representative picture.
    • Open Dictionary Offers various definitions, translations and pronunciations in many languages (uses Wiktionary and WordNet for most of its entries).
    • WordWebOnline.com A dictionary/thesaurus and meta-search (also available as a free download)
    • TheFreeDictionary.com A dictionary, a thesaurus, a literature reference library, and a search engine all in one.
    • hyperdictionary.com One of the more comprehensive online dictionaries.
    • www.webster-dictionary.org A dictionary and a thesaurus. It has every word linked to every other word.
    • Dictionary.com A dictionary and thesaurus and other language aids.
    • Your Dictionary
  • Dictionary Collections
  • Specialty Dictionaries
  • Multilingual Dictionaries
  • The DICT protocol is a client/server model for dictionaries. Many free dictionaries are appearing in the dict format. List of collaborative dictionaries An open content dictionary project is the GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English (GCIDE). This dictionary uses Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) and WordNet as its sources and is being developed collaboratively under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It describes itself as "a freely-available set of ASCII files containing the marked-up text of a substantial English dictionary". Other collaborative dictionary projects: See also: DICT, the dictionary server protocol Further reading
    • Dictionaries, The Art and Craft of Lexicography, Sidney I. Landau, Simon & Schuster, 1998, hardcover, ISBN 0684180960
    • The Professor and the Madman, A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester, HarperPerennial, New York, 1998, trade paperback, ISBN 0-06-017596-6. (published in the UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne)
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    The above article is adapted from from Wikipedia All Wikipedia article text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

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