Lexicography

This book is an accessible introduction to lexicography – the study of dictionaries.

We rely on dictionaries to provide us with definitions of words, and to tell us
how to spell them. They are used at home and at school, cited in law courts,
sermons and parliament, and referred to by crossword addicts and scrabble
players alike. But why are dictionaries structured as they are? What types of
dictionary exist, and what purposes do they serve? Who uses a dictionary, and
for what?
Lexicography: An Introduction provides a detailed overview of the history, types
and content of these essential reference works. Howard Jackson analyses a wide
range of dictionaries, from those for native speakers to thematic dictionaries and
learners’ dictionaries, including those on CD-ROM, to reveal the ways in which
dictionaries fulfil their dual function of describing the vocabulary of English and
providing a useful and accessible reference resource.
Beginning with an introduction to the terms used in lexicology to describe
words and vocabulary, and offering summaries and suggestions for further read-
ing, Lexicography: An Introduction is concise and student-friendly. It is ideal for
anyone with an interest in the development and use of dictionaries.

Howard Jackson is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the

University of Central England. His publications include Grammar and Vocabulary
(Routledge, 2002), Words and their Meaning (Longman, 1988), and Words, Meaning
and Vocabulary (Cassell, 2000).
Lexicography
An introduction

Howard Jackson

London and New York

First published 2002
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2002 Howard Jackson
Typeset in Bembo by
The Running Head Limited, Cambridge
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested

ISBN 0–415–23172–8 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–23173–6 (pbk)
Contents

Preface vii
Dictionaries cited ix

1 Words 1

2 Facts about words 10

3 The dictionary 21

4 The beginnings 31

5 The New English Dictionary 47

6 Up to the present 61

7 Users and uses 74

8 Meaning in dictionaries 86

9 Beyond definition 101

10 Etymology 117

11 Dictionaries for learners 129

12 Abandoning the alphabet 145

13 Compiling dictionaries 161

14 Criticising dictionaries 173

References 184
Index 189
Preface

Much has happened, both in respect of the making of dictionaries and in respect
of their academic study, in the twelve or so years since my previous book
on dictionaries (Words and Their Meaning, Longman, 1988). Then, the ‘corpus
revolution’ (Rundell and Stock 1992) had only just begun – Words and Their
Meaning just managed to catch the first (1987) edition of the Collins COBUILD
English Dictionary. Now virtually all dictionaries published in the UK make
some claim to have used a computer corpus in their compilation. Not only have
learners’ dictionaries developed by leaps and bounds – the Oxford Advanced
Learner’s Dictionary was in its third edition then, now in its sixth, and the Cam-
bridge International Dictionary of English was still a long way off – but native
speaker dictionaries have also seen significant developments – the publication
of the New Oxford Dictionary of English in 1998, as well as three editions of the
Concise Oxford, not to mention the second edition of the great OED in 1989
and the beginning of the massive revision that will result in the third edition,
planned for 2010.
Dictionaries have also appeared during the period in electronic format, nota-
bly as CD-ROMs, opening up new possibilities, not only in how dictionaries
can be used and exploited, but also in how dictionary material can be organised
and presented. Dictionaries are also accessible online, through the internet,
including the OED, enabling subscribers to view the revisions that will consti-
tute the third edition, as they are posted quarterly.
The study of lexicography has also developed and flourished during the last
dozen years. They saw the launch of the highly successful International Journal of
Lexicography in 1988, for the first ten years under the editorship of Robert Ilson,
and latterly that of Tony Cowie. The mighty three-volume Encyclopedia of Lexico-
graphy (Hausmann et al. 1989–91) delineated the state of the art, and the Diction-
ary of Lexicography (Hartmann and James 1998) mapped the territory. More
recently, Reinhard Hartmann’s Teaching and Researching Lexicography (2001) has
set the agenda for the business of academic lexicography. And Sidney Landau
has updated his readable Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (second
edition, 2001) with its transatlantic perspective.
It is time for a new treatment of the subject in the UK. I am grateful to Louisa
Semlyen and to Routledge for taking this on. The book is dedicated to all the
viii Preface
final-year students who have enabled me to develop the material by taking
my ‘Lexicography’ module on the English degree at the University of Central
England in Birmingham over more years than I care to recall.

Howard Jackson
Birmingham
August 2001
Dictionaries cited

The following dictionaries are mentioned in the course of this book. (Note: a
superscript number, e.g. 19882, refers to the edition; in this case, the second
edition published in 1988.)

Native speaker dictionaries

Chambers English Dictionary, (19887 ) edited by Catherine Schwarz, George
Davidson, Anne Seaton and Virginia Tebbit.
Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (1996) edited by Mairi Robinson.
Collins Concise Dictionary (1982; 19882; 19923; 19994, edited by Diana Treffry).
Collins English Dictionary (1979 edited by Patrick Hanks, 19862 edited by Patrick
Hanks, 1991/943 edited by Marian Makins, 19984 edited by Diana Treffry).
Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911 edited by H.G. and F.W. Fowler, 19292, 19343,
19514, 19645, 19766, 19827, 19908, 19959, 199910 edited by Judy Pearsall).
Encarta Concise English Dictionary (2001) edited by Kathy Rooney, Bloomsbury.
Longman Dictionary of the English Language (1984, 19912 edited by Brian O’Kill).
A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1888–1928) edited by James
Murray, Henry Bradley, W.A. Craigie and C.T. Onions.
New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) edited by Judy Pearsall.
Oxford English Dictionary (1933 edited by James Murray et al., 19892 edited by
John Simpson and Edmund Weiner).
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1993) edited by
Lesley Brown.
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (1961) edited
by Philip Gove.

Monolingual learners’ dictionaries

Cambridge Dictionary of American English (2000) edited by Sidney Landau.
Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995) edited by Paul Proctor.
Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (1987, 19952, 20013) edited by John Sinclair.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978 edited by Paul Proctor, 19872
edited by Della Summers and M. Rundell, 19953 edited by Della Summers).
x Dictionaries cited
Longman Language Activator (1993) edited by Della Summers.
Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (1981) compiled by Tom McArthur.
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (1948 edited by A.S.
Hornby, E.V. Gatenby and H. Wakefield; 19632 edited by A.S. Hornby,
E.V. Gatenby and H. Wakefield; 19743 edited by A.S. Hornby, with A.P.
Cowie and J. Windsor Lewis; 19894 edited by A.P. Cowie, 19955 edited by
Jonathan Crowther; 20006 edited by Sally Wehmeier).

Thematic dictionaries
A Thesaurus of Old English (1995) compiled by Jane Roberts and Christian Kay,
with Lynne Grundy.
Longman Dictionary of Scientific Usage (1979) compiled by A. Godman and E.M.F.
Payne.
Longman Language Activator (1993) edited by Della Summers.
Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (1981) compiled by Tom McArthur.
Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), Longmans, Green and Co.
The Scots Thesaurus (1990), edited by Iseabail McLeod.

Abbreviations
In order to save space, dictionaries regularly cited will usually be referred to in
the course of the book by the following abbreviations:

CCD – Collins Concise Dictionary

CED – Collins English Dictionary
Chambers – Chambers English Dictionary
CIDE – Cambridge International Dictionary of English
COBUILD – Collins COBUILD English Dictionary
COD – Concise Oxford Dictionary
ECED – Encarta Concise English Dictionary
LDEL – Longman Dictionary of the English Language
LDOCE – Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
NODE – New Oxford Dictionary of English
OALD – Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
OED – Oxford English Dictionary
SOED – Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
W3 – Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

Where the abbreviation is followed by a number, e.g. COD8, the number

refers to the edition, i.e. Concise Oxford Dictionary, eighth edition.
 Words 1

1 Words

1.1 What is a word?

You take a dictionary off the shelf, or access a dictionary on your computer, and
open it because you want to look up a ‘word’. Dictionaries are the repositories
of words. Words are arranged in dictionaries in alphabetical order, and as you
look down the column in a print dictionary or the list in an electronic diction-
ary, you are reading a list of words. Or are you? Here is the list of the 25
‘headwords’ between want and wardrobe in COD10 (i.e. Concise Oxford Diction-
ary, tenth edition: see ‘Dictionaries cited’, p. ix):

want, wanting, wanton, wapentake, wapiti, War., war, waratah, war baby,
warble1, warble2, warble fly, warbler, warby, war chest, war crime, war
cry, ward, -ward, war dance, warden, warder, ward heeler, ward of court,
wardrobe.

A number of items in this list do not quite match our usual concept of what
constitutes a word, which is – I suggest – ‘a sequence of letters bounded by
spaces’. Indeed, only 15 of the 25 items could be described in this way. Two
of the remaining items are less than a full word: the abbreviation War. (for
Warwickshire), and the suffix –ward (used to form words like backward, skyward –
see Chapter 2). The other eight items all consist of more than one ‘word’:
seven of them have just two words, and one has three (ward of court). You
will also have noticed that one word (warble) is entered twice. So, just what is
a ‘word’?
The word before want in the COD10 list is wannabe. Is that a word, or is it
three (want to be)? In our usual concept of a word, it is one, because it is a
sequence of letters bounded by spaces. This conception of words comes, of
course, from writing, the medium in which we are most conscious of words;
and dictionaries are based on the written form of the language. In speech, though,
words are composed of sounds and syllables, and they follow one another in the
flow of speech without spaces or pauses. We make no more pause in saying war
baby than we do with wardrobe, even though the first consists of two words in
writing and the second of only one.
2 Words
There is, clearly, a measure of confusion here that needs some sorting out in
a book about words and dictionaries. Let us make the following distinction of
terms:

orthographic word a word in writing, a sequence of letters bounded by spaces

phonological word a word in speech, a sequence of sounds (the boundaries of
phonological words are determined by rules of syllable structure, stress, and
the like)
lexeme a word in the vocabulary of a language; it may occur as a headword in a
dictionary.

A lexeme may, therefore, consist of more than one orthographic word, as warble
fly, war chest, ward of court. Even though they are listed as headwords, we should
exclude abbreviations and affixes (see 1.6 below) from the category of lexeme.

1.2 Same sound, same spelling, different word

We noticed that warble is entered twice in COD10. The compilers of this dic-
tionary are following common practice and recognising two different lexemes
with the same spelling (and, as it happens, the same pronunciation). The first
warble is the verb that refers to birdsong; the second is a noun denoting ‘a
swelling or abscess beneath the skin on the back of cattle . . . caused by the
presence of the larva of a warble fly’. However, the fact that the meanings of the
two lexemes are completely unrelated is not the primary criterion for distin-
guishing them. Dictionaries usually operate with the criterion of etymology
(see Chapter 10) for deciding that a single orthographic word represents more
than one lexeme. If a single spelling can be shown to have more than one
origin, then it constitutes more than one lexeme. In the case of warble, the
‘birdsong’ lexeme has its origin, according to COD10, in the Old Northern
French word werble, which came into English during the Middle English period
(1066–1500). The ‘abscess’ lexeme also originates in the Middle English period,
but it has a different, according to COD10 ‘uncertain’, provenance.
Lexemes that share the same spelling and pronunciation, but have a different
etymology, are termed homonyms (a Greek word, meaning ‘same (homo) name
(nym)’).
Another orthographic word with a double entry in the dictionary is tear. The
first tear lexeme relates to ‘pulling or ripping apart’, the second denotes the drop
of salty liquid that comes from the eyes when someone weeps. In this case,
however, the same spelling has different pronunciations, i.e. phonological words.
Since the dictionary is based on spelling, tear is entered twice. As might be
expected, tear (rip) and tear (weep) also have different origins, both from Old
English, the first from teran and the second from tBar. Lexemes that share the
same spelling, but not the same pronunciation, are called homographs (from
Greek, ‘same’ + ‘writing’). There are not very many homographs in English, by
 Words 3
comparison with the number of homonyms. Here are some further examples
for you to figure out (or look up):

bow, curate, denier, irony, prayer, refuse, reserve, sow, supply, wind.

Much more common in English are the counterparts to homographs: lexemes

that are pronounced the same, but spelled differently, e.g. pale/pail. These present
no problem to a dictionary, since it is the spelling that takes priority; and each is
entered as a headword at the appropriate place in the alphabetical sequence.
Lexemes that share the same pronunciation, but not the same spelling, are called
homophones (from Greek, ‘same’ + ‘sound’). Here are some further homo-
phone pairs in English:

bare/bear, gait/gate, haul/hall, leak/leek, miner/minor, paw/poor/pore/

pour, sew/sow, stake/steak, taught/taut

You will notice that most homophones arise because vowel sounds that used to
be pronounced differently, as represented by the spelling, have in the course of
historical sound changes come to be pronounced the same.

1.3 Lexemes and variants

If you look up sung in a dictionary, you will find a very brief entry along the
lines of ‘past participle of sing’, which is a cross-reference to the entry for sing. If
you look up the word talked, which is the past participle of talk, you will not
find an entry. For both these words, the dictionary gives their description under
a single entry: sing for sung, and talk for talked. You do not need a separate
treatment of sung or talked, because what is said about sing or talk is equally
applicable to them. They are merely ‘variants’ of the entry word; in effect they
are the ‘same word’.
The lexeme sing, for example, has the following variants: sing, sings, sang,
singing, sung. The lexeme talk has one variant fewer: talk, talks, talked, talking.
What we are looking at are the inflections of verbs in English:

base/present tense sing talk

third person singular/present tense sings talks
past tense sang talked
present participle singing talking
past participle sung talked

The verb talk represents the ‘regular’ paradigm, where the past tense and the
past participle have the same form, with the –(e)d suffix. The verb sing is one of
a number with ‘irregular’ inflections.
There is a sense in which sing, sings, sang, singing and sung are all the ‘same
word’; they are different manifestations of the same lexeme, variants chosen
4 Words
according to the grammatical context of the lexeme. For example, if the subject
of a sentence is a ‘third person singular’ (equivalent to he, she or it) and the
speaker/writer has chosen present tense, then the form of the verb will be sings
or talks, with the ‘s’ suffix marking the ‘third person singular present tense’ (e.g.
‘until the fat lady/she sings’) We need a further term to distinguish this type of
‘word’:

word-form an inflectional variant of a lexeme

To illustrate word-forms we have chosen verbs, because verb lexemes have

more inflections than any other type of lexeme in English. Two other types of
lexeme regularly have inflectional variants and so more than one word-form:
nouns and adjectives – though not every member of these classes, as is the case
with verbs. Countable nouns (biscuit, coin), but not uncountable nouns (dough,
salt), have a ‘plural’ inflection. Some nouns, mainly referring to animate beings,
have a ‘possessive’ inflection. The word-forms for plural nouns have a –(e)s
suffix as the regular inflection (bananas, oranges, mangoes). A small number of
countable nouns form the plural irregularly, e.g. feet, geese, mice, teeth; children;
knives, loaves; nuclei, millennia, formulae, hypotheses, criteria. The possessive inflec-
tion is normally marked in the singular noun by an apostrophe + s (e.g. cat’s,
girl’s, nephew’s), and in the plural noun by an apostrophe only, placed after the
plural suffix (e.g. cats’, girls’ nephews’). This, of course, applies to writing: in
speech, the possessive singular adds –(e)s, and so is no different from the plural;
and the plural possessive is the same as the normal plural, except where the
plural is formed irregularly (e.g. mice’s, children’s, women’s). Summarising, the
word-forms of (some) noun lexemes are:

base/singular girl child

plural girls children
possessive singular girl’s child’s
possessive plural girls’ children’s

Note that the three inflected forms of girl (the ‘regular’ paradigm) have the same
pronunciation.
Some adjective lexemes in English have a ‘comparative’ and a ‘superlative’
form. The adjectives concerned are ‘gradable’ (e.g. long, quick, small), rather
than ‘ungradable’ (daily, mortal, sterile). Most gradable adjectives that are one-
syllable in length can have these forms, as may most two-syllable gradable adjec-
tives. The regular inflection for the comparative is –er, and for the superlative
–est (e.g. longer/longest, quicker/quickest, smaller/smallest). There is a very small
number of irregular forms: good, better, best; bad, worse, worst. An alternative way
of expressing comparison, applied to some two-syllable adjectives and to nearly
all gradable adjectives of three syllables or more, is with the adverbs more and
most (e.g. more/most skilful, more/most treacherous). Summarising, the word-forms
of (some) adjective lexemes are:
 Words 5
base slow good
comparative slower better
superlative slowest best

When one-syllable adjectives do not permit word-forms with –er/-est, it is usu-

ally because their pronunciation is somehow awkward (e.g. sourer, wronger).

1.4 War chests and wards of court

In the list from the COD10 in 1.1 we noted several lexemes composed of more
than one orthographic word. A number of them have war as their first element:
war chest, war crime, war cry, war dance. Two independent lexemes have come
together to form a new lexeme with a specialised meaning, to denote some
entity that is considered worth having its own ‘name’. We call such lexemes
compounds (see further Chapter 2). Sometimes compounds are written, as in
the examples with war, with a space between the two elements. Other com-
pounds are written as a single orthographic word (e.g. warhead, warlord, warpath,
warship), while others have a hyphen joining the two elements (e.g. war-torn,
window-shop, world-class). The current tendency is away from ‘hyphenated com-
pounds’ towards either ‘solid compounds’ (one orthographic word) or ‘open
compounds’ (two or more orthographic words).
The other multi-word lexeme in the list is ward of court, which is a phrase
rather than a compound. Phrasal lexemes have a number of common struc-
tures, of which the ‘noun + preposition + noun’ of ward of court is one. Here are
some further examples of this structure:

age of consent, cash on delivery, chapel of rest, home from home, hostage
to fortune, man about town, meals on wheels, place in the sun, rite of
passage, skeleton in the cupboard.

A second phrasal structure consists of a noun in the possessive followed by

another noun, e.g.

athlete’s foot, banker’s card, collector’s item, fool’s paradise, hair’s breadth,
lady’s finger, ploughman’s lunch, potter’s wheel, saint’s day, smoker’s cough,
traveller’s cheque, writer’s block.

A third phrasal structure consists of two words of the same type (noun, verb,
adjective) joined by the conjunction and. These are sometimes called ‘binomials’.
Here are some examples:

bells and whistles, black and white, bow and scrape, down and out, fast and
furious, hammer and tongs, nip and tuck, pins and needles, rock and roll,
sweet and sour, ups and downs, you and yours.
6 Words
There are also a few cases of ‘trinomials’, e.g. hop, skip and jump; hook, line and
sinker. You will notice that a number of these items are used metaphorically:
hammer and tongs has nothing to do with the literal instruments used by the
blacksmith, but refers to the intensity or vigour with which something is done.
A fourth kind of phrasal lexeme consists of a verb + adverb (sometimes called
a ‘particle’), to form what are called ‘phrasal verbs’. Here are some examples:

break up, calm down, find out, give in, look over, pass out, show up, take
off, waste away, wear out.

Some of these phrasal verbs have a literal or near-literal meaning, others are
more-or-less figurative in meaning. In one of its meanings, take off is literal (e.g.
referring to aircraft leaving the runway), in another it is figurative (in the sense
of ‘imitate’).
A fifth kind of phrasal lexeme, if indeed we can count them as lexemes, are
typically metaphorical or figurative in meaning. They are idioms, which have
a range of structures from phrase up to whole sentence. An idiom has two
essential characteristics: its meaning is more than the meaning of the sum of its
parts, and usually figurative; and it has a relatively fixed structure. The idiom a
storm in a teacup (American English equivalent a tempest in a teapot) has the figurative
meaning of a ‘fuss about nothing’, and there is no possibility of substituting or
adding anything to its structure. In pull the wool over someone’s eyes, the meaning
is figurative (i.e. ‘deceive’), and the only substitution possibilities are appropri-
ate inflections for the verb pull and an appropriate possessive noun or pronoun
in the place of someone’s. Idioms are all pervasive in language and show a diver-
sity of form and meaning (see Fernando and Flavell (1981) for a fuller treat-
ment). Here are a few more examples from English:

know which side one’s bread is buttered, at the drop of a hat, go against the
grain, come to a pretty pass, take someone for a ride, spill the beans, throw
the baby out with the bathwater, walk on eggshells.

You will notice that in some cases (e.g. take someone for a ride) a literal interpre-
tation is also possible. Only the context will reveal whether the literal or the
metaphorical (idiomatic) meaning is the intended one.

1.5 Classifying words

In talking about words, we often, as already in this chapter, need to refer to
them by the conventional broad classification into ‘parts of speech’, or ‘word
classes’ as the preferred term now is. Rather than assume that this is general
knowledge, as most dictionaries do, we will devote a little discussion to it.
Although we have school-based definitions in our minds, such as ‘a verb is a
doing word’, words are classified more rigorously largely on the basis of the
roles they play in the structure of sentences. English has four large classes, into
 Words 7
which most new words go, and four smaller, fairly static classes. The four large
classes are:

• nouns are the largest class by far; they represent the animate and inanimate
objects that are the participants in sentences as subjects, objects, etc. (beauty,
cat, leaf, niece, nonsense, water)
• verbs represent the action, event or state that the sentence is about, and hold
the pivotal position in the sentence, determining which other elements
need to be present (break, decide, fall, have, keep, love)
• adjectives occur in front of nouns as descriptive words, as well as after verbs
like be with a similar function ( feeble, gigantic, lazy, new, rough, vain)
• adverbs are a diverse class, in part representing circumstantial information
such as time (again, always, sometimes, soon) and manner (clearly, efficiently,
quickly, tentatively), in part acting as modifiers of adjectives or other adverbs
(quite, somewhat, very), in part forming connections between sentences (how-
ever, moreover, therefore).

The four smaller word classes, whose major function is to link the members of
the larger classes together in sentence structure, are:

• pronouns stand for nouns and their accompanying words (noun phrases) to
avoid unnecessary repetition, including personal pronouns (I, you, he, she,
it, we, they), possessive pronouns (mine, yours, hers), reflexive pronouns (my-
self, yourself, themselves), relative pronouns (who, whose, which), indefinite
pronouns (someone, nobody, anything)
• determiners accompany nouns and are subdivided into ‘identifiers’ and ‘quan-
tifiers’; identifiers include the articles (a, the), demonstratives (this, that) and
possessives (my, your, her, our, their); quantifiers include the numerals (two,
five; second, fifth) and indefinite quantifiers ( few, many, several)
• prepositions combine with nouns or noun phrases primarily to form pre-
positional phrases (at, for, from, in, of, on, over, through, with)
• conjunctions are used to connect clauses or sentences, but also phrases and
words; they include the co-ordinating conjunctions (and, but, or) and a
larger number of subordinating conjunctions (although, because, if, until, when,
while).

You should consult a grammar book if you need a more extensive explanation
of the word classes.

1.6 Taking words to pieces

In the course of this chapter, we have mentioned terms like ‘affix’ and ‘suffix’,
which are parts of words. This section looks at the analysis of words into their
constituent elements and suggests some terms that will be useful in talking about
word structure. First of all, we need a term to denote an element of a word: it
8 Words
is morpheme. Words are composed of morphemes. Many words, sometimes
called ‘simple’ words, consist of only one morpheme:

bed, dream, go, in, over, please, shallow, treat, usual, vote, whole, yellow.

Here are some words composed of more than one morpheme:

bedroom, dreamy, going, live-in, overland, displease, shallowest, mistreat-

ment, usually, voters, wholemeal, yellowish.

Each of these words has, as one of its morphemes, a ‘simple’ word from the
earlier list, which forms the ‘root’, or in the case of compounds like bedroom one
of the roots, of the word. The root morpheme is the kernel of the word, with
the main meaning, which is modified by other morphemes in various ways.
Compounds are composed of two or more root morphemes: bedroom, live-in,
overland, wholemeal. These compounds have a variety of structures in terms of
the word class membership of the roots: noun + noun, verb + preposition,
preposition + noun, adjective + noun. Many compounds are like bedroom, where
the first part modifies the second and the word class of the compound is that of
the second part, in this case a noun: a ‘bedroom’ is a kind of ‘room’. The other
three compounds are different: live-in, with a preposition as second part, is an
adjective (as in a live-in nanny); overland, with a noun as second part is either an
adjective (an overland journey) or an adverb (we’re travelling overland); and whole-
meal, again with a noun as second part, is an adjective (wholemeal bread).
The other words in the list are all composed of root + affix. ‘Affix’ is the
general term for morphemes that cannot be used by themselves as simple words;
they only occur ‘bound’ to another morpheme. If they occur before the root,
and so are bound to the right, they are called ‘prefixes’ (e.g. dis- in displease). If
they occur after the root, and so are bound to the left, they are ‘suffixes’ (e.g.
-ish in yellowish). Note that, when writing affixes, the convention is to put a
hyphen on the side where the affix is bound, i.e. to the right of prefixes and to
the left of suffixes.
Some of the suffixes mark ‘inflections’ (see 1.3 above): go-ing (present parti-
ciple), shallow-est (superlative), voter-s (plural). There are no inflectional prefixes
in English. The resulting words are ‘word-forms’ (inflectional variants) of the
root lexeme.
The other affixes represent ‘derivations’. The addition of the affix creates a
new, derived lexeme. We would expect it to be entered in a dictionary some-
where, though, as we shall see (Chapter 8), dictionaries vary in how they treat
derivations. The addition of a suffix usually changes the word class of the root,
though a prefix rarely does:

dream (noun) + -y dreamy (adjective)

dis- + please (verb) displease (verb)
mis + treat (verb) mistreat (verb)
 Words 9
mistreat + -ment mistreatment (noun)
usual (adjective) + -ly usually (adverb)
vote (verb) + -er voter (noun)
yellow (adjective) + -ish yellowish (adjective)

Note that an inflectional suffix, e.g. the plural ‘s’ on voters, is always the final
suffix in a word.
We might conclude from our discussion of morphemes so far that roots are
always ‘free’ (i.e. can occur as simple lexemes), and affixes are always ‘bound’
(i.e. they need a root to attach to). However, there is a certain set of words in
English, mostly compounds, that have bound roots. Here are some examples:

anthropomorphic, astronaut, bibliography, biology, neuralgia, synchrony,

telepathy, xenophobia.

These lexemes are formed from (bound) roots that are taken from the classical
languages (Greek and Latin) and put together to form, for the most part, new
words that were unknown in classical Greek and Latin. They are known as
‘neo-classical compounds’, and their parts are called ‘combining forms’. Our
examples are formed as follows:

• anthropo- (human) + -morphic (in the form of )

• astro- (star) + -naut (sailor)
• biblio- (book) + -graphy (writing)
• bio- (life) + -ology (study)
• neuro- (nerve) + -algia (pain)
• syn- (same) + -chrony (time)
• tele- (distant) + -pathy (feeling)
• xeno- (foreigner) + -phobia (fear).

Some roots from the classical languages occur in derivations, when they are also
bound, e.g. chron-ic, graph-ical, naut-ical, neur-al, path-etic.
To summarise:

a word is composed of one or more morphemes

a morpheme may function as a root or as an affix (prefix or suffix)
a root morpheme is usually free, an affix is always bound
bound roots are usually combining forms from Greek or Latin.

1.7 Further reading

You can find a fuller treatment of words and word structure in Jackson and Zé
Amvela’s Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English
Lexicology (2000) and in Francis Katamba’s English Words (1994).
Words
You can find a fuller treatment of words and word structure in Jackson and Zé Amvela's Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An
Introduction to Modern English Lexicology (2000) and in Francis Katamba's English Words (1994).

Facts about words

For many of the topics of this chapter, see: Jackson and Zé Amvela's Words, Meaning and Vocabulary (2000) and David Crystal's
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995), especially Part II.
On new words, see: John Ayto's Twentieth Century Words (1999) and Elizabeth Knowles and Julia Elliott's The Oxford Dictionary of
New Words (1997).
Sense relations are discussed fully by D.A. Cruse in his Lexical Semantics (1996).
See Dick Hudson's article in IJL (1988) for a ‘Checklist of Lexical Facts’.

The dictionary
A good overview is Sidney Landau's Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (originally 1989, now in a second edition, 2001).
Also recommended is Henri Béjoint's (1994) Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries, Clarendon Press Oxford,
republished in paperback, with only minor updating, in 2000 as Modern Lexicography: An Introduction, Oxford University Press.

The beginnings
The history of lexicography is entertainingly told in Jonathon Green's Chasing the Sun (1996).
Dictionaries before Cawdrey's are described in Gabriele Stein's The English Dictionary before Cawdrey (1985). Those from Cawdrey
up to (but not including) Johnson are treated in De Witt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes’ The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to
Johnson 1604–1755 (1946), republished in a version edited by Gabriele Stein (1991).
Johnson's story is told in Andrew Reddick's The Making of Johnson's Dictionary 1746–1773 (1990).

The New English Dictionary

The OED website <oed.com> is an excellent resource on all aspects of the dictionary, including its history and current development.
The website offers a tour of the OED Online: <oed.com/tour>.
James Murray's story is told in an account by his granddaughter, K.M. Elizabeth Murray, in Caught in the Web of Words (1977). His
friendship with Dr W.C. Minor is described by Simon Winchester in The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1999).
An explanation of the second edition of the OED is given by Donna Lee Berg in A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary (1993). A
collection of scholarly articles on the OED can be found in Lexicography and the OED (2000) edited by Lynda Mugglestone.

Up to the present
Chapters 10 and 11 of Jonathon Green's Chasing the Sun (1996) trace the history of lexicography in America. The controversy
surrounding W3 is told in Herbert C. Morton's The Story of Webster's Third (1994), and James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt's
Dictionaries and THAT Dictionary (1962) contains a fascinating collection of contemporary reviews of W3.
Dictionary typology is discussed in Chapter 5 of Reinhard Hartmann's Teaching and Researching Lexicography (2001), and in Chapter
1 (pp. 32ff ) of Henri Béjoint's Modern Lexicography (2000).
Material on electronic dictionaries is still sparse. American English dictionaries on CD-ROM are reviewed by Creswell (1996); Nesi
(1999) looks at electronic dictionaries for language learners (more applicable to Chapter 11); and Pruvost (2000) reports on a
colloquium that discussed the transferring of print dictionaries to the electronic medium.

Users and uses

It is useful to read the prefaces and other front matter to a number of dictionaries, as well as the blurb on their dust jackets, to gain an
idea of how dictionaries are presenting themselves to their potential users. Chapters 4 and 5 of Henri Béjoint's Modern Lexicography
(2000) discuss the aims of dictionaries, their functions in society, and the reference needs of their users. A ‘user perspective’ is also
provided by Chapter 6 of Reinhard Hartmann's Teaching and Researching Lexicography (2001). Bo Svensén discusses dictionary
users in relation to types of dictionary in Chapter 2 of his Practical Lexicography (1993).
Meaning in dictionaries
Sidney Landau deals with ‘definition’ in Chapter 4 of Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (1989), as does Bo Svensén in
Chapter 10 of his Practical Lexicography (1993). The section on defining styles owes something to Barbara Kipfer's treatment in
Chapter 6 of Workbook on Lexicography (1984), where she also discusses the ordering of senses.

Beyond definition
For information on how an individual dictionary or edition deals with the topics discussed in this chapter the ‘Guide to the Dictionary’ is
the place to start.
Dick Hudson's article on ‘The linguistic foundations for lexical research and dictionary design’ in the International Journal of
Lexicography (1988) surveys the lexical information that dictionaries should take account of. Bo Svensén's Practical Lexicography
(1993) has chapters on most of the concerns of this chapter.
Sidney Landau has a chapter on usage (Chapter 5) in Dictionaries: the Art and Craft of Lexicography (1989, 2001). Juhani Norri has
two articles in IJL on labelling: ‘Regional labels in some British and American dictionaries’ (vol. 9, 1996), and ‘Labelling of derogatory
words in dictionaries’ (vol. 13, 2000).

Etymology
The ‘Guide to Using the Dictionary’ in a dictionary's front matter will contain brief information on how to interpret the etymology in the
work concerned. Donna Lee Berg's A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary (1993) contains a section (pp. 22ff ) on the OED's
etymology.
Barbara Kipfer's Workbook on Lexicography (1984) contains a chapter (12) on etymology, as does David Crystal's The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995), though much of it is about place and personal names. Landau (2001) offers a
perspective on etymology in dictionaries (pp. 127–34), as does Svensén (1993), Chapter 15.
A specialist etymological dictionary is a further source for following up on the topic of this chapter.

Dictionaries for learners

The development of learners’ dictionaries, up to the ‘third generation’ (OALD4, LDOCE2 and COBUILD1), is told in Tony Cowie's
English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History (1999). The process of compiling COBUILD1 is reported by some of those
involved in Looking Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project (1987), edited by John Sinclair.
Articles on the 1995 generation of MLDs are contained in The Perfect Learners’ Dictionary(?) (1999) edited by Thomas Herbst and
Kerstin Popp. Reinhard Heuberger reviews both print and CD-ROM versions of MLDs in his doctoral thesis, published as Monolingual
Dictionaries for Foreign Learners of English (2000).
The Hausmann et al. (1989–91) International Encyclopedia of Lexicography contains a number of articles on learners’ dictionaries. A
seminal contribution is Michael Rundell's (1998) article, ‘Recent Trends in English Pedagogical Lexicography’, in the International
Journal of Lexicography.

Abandoning the alphabet

A most lucid account of the development of the thematic tradition in reference works, including lexicography, is found in Tom
McArthur's Worlds of Reference (1986), now, lamentably, out of print. Chapters 12 to 14 of his Living Words (1998) also deal with
thematic lexicography, including an account of the Longman Lexicon. Werner Hüllen's English Dictionaries 800–1700: The Topical
Tradition (1999) treats in some detail the major works during the development of the tradition.
Genuine editions of Roget's Thesaurus (e.g. Kirkpatrick 1995) contain Roget's original introduction in which he outlines the rationale
for the work and its underlying conception.

Compiling dictionaries
The best place to start is with Chapter 7, ‘Dictionary making’, of Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (2001) by Sidney
Landau, himself with experience of involvement in a number of dictionary projects. His Chapter 6, ‘The corpus in lexicography’, is also
of relevance to the discussion in this chapter (13.2).
Bo Svensén's Practical Lexicography: Principles and Methods of Dictionary Making (1993) and Ladislav Zgusta's Manual of
Lexicography (1971), though a little old now, both review some of the theoretical and practical decisions facing lexicographers in
compiling a dictionary. Samuel Johnson's Plan and Preface are still worth reading for their forward-looking insights (both reproduced in
Wilson 1957), and the original OED Preface and General Explanations in Volume 1 of OED1 merit study.
Some of the accounts of the making of individual dictionaries were mentioned earlier (13.1): Reddick (1990) on Johnson, Murray
(1977) on the OED, Morton (1994) on W3, and Sinclair (1987) on COBUILD.
Criticising dictionaries
There is no full-length treatment of dictionary criticism. The place to start is with Reinhard Hartmann's Teaching and Researching
Lexicography (2001), where he deals with the topic in Chapter 4, Sections 4.3 and 4.4, which also contain references to other relevant
articles and books.
From there it would be useful to read some of the reviews that have appeared, for example, in the International Journal of
Lexicography. The reviews, mentioned earlier, of COD8 by Higashi et al. (1992) and of LDEL2 by Masuda et al. (1994), are particularly
recommended; but most numbers of the journal contain dictionary reviews of varying extent and comprehensiveness. The other
journal in which dictionaries are regularly reviewed is English Today.

References
Allen, R. (1999) ‘Lumping and splitting’, English Today, 16(4), 61–63.
Allen, R. (2000) ‘Size matters’, review of Collins English Dictionary, The New Oxford Dictionary of English and Encarta World English
Dictionary, English Today, 16(2), 57–61.
Atkins, B.T.S. (ed.) (1998) Using Dictionaries: Studies of Dictionary Use by Language Learners and Translators, Lexicographica
Series Maior, no. 88, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen.
Ayto, J. (1989) The Longman Register of New Words, Longman.
Ayto, J. (1990) The Longman Register of New Words, Volume Two, Longman.
Ayto, J. (1999) Twentieth Century Words, Oxford University Press.
Bailey, R.W. (ed.) (1987) Dictionaries of English: Prospects for the Record of Our Language, Cambridge University Press.
Béjoint, H. (1978) ‘Trois dictionnaires anglais récents: lequel choisir?’, Les Langues modernes, 5, 465–474.
Béjoint, H. (1981) ‘The foreign student's use of monolingual English dictionaries: a study of language needs and reference skills’,
Applied Linguistics, 2(3), 207–222.
Béjoint, H. (1994) Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Béjoint, H. (2000) Modern Lexicography: An Introduction, republication of Béjoint (1994), Oxford University Press.
Benson, M. , Benson, E. and Ilson, R. (1986) Lexicographic Description of English, John Benjamins.
Berg, D.L. (1993) A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press.
Bogaards, P. and van der Kloot, W.A. (2001) ‘The use of grammatical information in learners’ dictionaries’, International Journal of
Lexicography, 14(2), 97–121.
Bolinger, D. (1990) ‘Review of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Fourth Edition’, International Journal of Lexicography, 3(2),
133–145.
Burton, T.H. and Burton, J. (eds) (1988) Lexicographical and Linguistic Studies: Essays in Honour of G.W. Turner , D.S. Brewer ,
Cambridge/St Edmundsbury Press, Suffolk.
Chapman, R.L. (1977) ‘Dictionary reviews and reviewing: 1900–1975’ in J.C. Raymond and I.W. Russell (eds) James B. McMillan:
Essays in Linguistics by His Friends and Colleagues, University of Alabama Press, 143–161.
Clear, J. (1996) ‘“Grammar and nonsense”: or syntax and word senses’ in J. Svartvik (ed.), 213–241.
Cowie, A.P. (1999) English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: a History, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Creswell, T.J. (1996) ‘American English dictionaries on CD-ROM’, Journal of English Linguistics 24(4), 358–368.
Cruse, D.A. (1996) Lexical Semantics, Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (1995) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge University Press.
Dolezal, F.F. M. et al. (eds) (1994) Lexicographica 9/1993: Wörterbuchkritik: Dictionary Criticism, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen.
Duden (2000) Die deutsche Rechtschreibung, Duden Band 1, twenty-second edition, Dudenverlag.
Ellegård, A. (1978) ‘On dictionaries for language learners’, Moderna Språk, LXXII, 225–244.
Fernando, C. and Flavell, R. (1981) On Idiom: Critical Views and Perspectives, Exeter Linguistic Studies 5, University of Exeter Press.
Friend, J.H. (1967) The Development of American Lexicography 1798–1864, Mouton.
Godman, A. and Payne, E.M.F. (1979) Longman Dictionary of Scientific Usage, Longman.
Green, J. (1996) Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made, Jonathan Cape.
Hartmann, R.R.K. (1989) ‘Sociology of the dictionary user: hypotheses and empirical studies’ in F.J. Hausmann et al. (eds), 102–111.
Hartmann, R.R.K. (1996) ‘Lexicography’ in R.R.K. Hartmann (ed.) Solving Language Problems, University of Exeter Press, 230–244.
Hartmann, R.R.K. (2001) Teaching and Researching Lexicography, Pearson Education.
Hartmann, R.R.K. and James, G. (1998) Dictionary of Lexicography, Routledge.
Hatherall, G. (1984) ‘Studying dictionary use: some findings and proposals’ in R.R.K. Hartmann (ed.) LEXeter ’83 Proceedings,
Lexicographica Series Maior, no. 1, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 183–189.
Hausmann, F.J. , Reichmann, O. , Wiegand, H.E. and Zgusta, L. (eds) (1989–91) Wörterbücher, Dictionaries, Dictionnaires: ein
internationales Handbuch zur Lexikographie vols 1–3, Walter de Gruyter.
Hebert, H. (1974) ‘Lingua frankly’, review of OALD3, The Guardian, 25 March 1974.
Herbst, T. and Popp, K. (eds) (1999) The Perfect Learners’ Dictionary(?), Lexicographica Series Maior, no. 95, Max Niemeyer Verlag,
Tübingen.
Heuberger, R. (2000) Monolingual Dictionaries for Foreign Learners of English: A Constructive Evaluation of the State-of-the-Art
Reference Works in Book Form and on CD-ROM, Austrian Studies in English 87, Braumüller, Vienna.
Higashi, N. et al. (1992) ‘Review of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Eighth Edition’, International Journal of
Lexicography, 5(2), 129–160.
Historical Thesaurus of English website <http://ww2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLang/thesaur/thes.htm>.
Holderbaum, A. (1999) Kriterien der Evaluation elektronischer Wörterbücher, Annual Report on English and American Studies 17,
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier.
Hornby, A.S. (1954) A Guide to Patterns and Usage in English, Oxford University Press.
Hornby, A.S. , Gatenby, E.V. and Wakefield, H. (1942) Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary, Kaitakusha, Tokyo.
Hudson, R. (1988) ‘The linguistic foundations for lexical research and dictionary design’, International Journal of Lexicography, 1(4),
287–312.
Hüllen, W. (1989) ‘In the beginning was the gloss’, in G. James (ed.) 100–116.
Hüllen, W. (1999) English Dictionaries 800–1700: The Topical Tradition, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Ilson, R. (1983) ‘Etymological information: can it help our students?’, ELT Journal, 37(1), 76–82.
Ilson, R.F. (1991) ‘Lexicography’, in K. Malmkjaer (ed.) The Linguistics Encyclopedia, Routledge, 291–298.
Ilson, R. (2001) ‘Review of Atkins (1998)’, International Journal of Lexicography, 14(1), 80–83.
Jackson, H. (1988) Words and their Meaning, Longman.
Jackson, H. (1995) ‘Learners’ dictionaries in contrast: Langenscheidt and Longman’, Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen, 24, 58–74.
Jackson, H. (1998) ‘How many words in YOUR dictionary?’, English Today, 14(3), 27–28.
Jackson, H. (2002) Grammar and Vocabulary, Routledge English Language Introductions, Routledge.
Jackson, H. and Zé Amvela, E. (2000) Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology, Cassell.
James, G. (ed.) (1989) Lexicographers and Their Works, University of Exeter Press.
Jehle, G. (1990) Das englische und französische Lernwörterbuch in der Rezension. Theorie und Praxis der Wörterbuchkritik,
Lexicographica Series Maior, no. 30, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen.
Jehle, G. (1999) ‘Learner's dictionaries on CD-ROM – mere gadgetry?’ in W. Falkner and H.-J. Schmid (eds) Words, Lexemes,
Concepts: Approaches to the Lexicon. Studies in Honour of Leonhard Lipka, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 353–363.
Jones, D. (1997) English Pronouncing Dictionary, fifteenth edition, (eds) Peter Roach and James Hartmann , Cambridge University
Press.
Katamba, F. (1994) English Words, Routledge.
Kipfer, B.A. (1984) Workbook on Lexicography, Exeter Linguistic Studies 8, University of Exeter Press.
Kipfer, B.A. (1986) ‘Investigating an onomasiological approach to dictionary material’, Dictionaries, Journal of the DSNA, 8, 55–64.
Kirkpatrick, B. (1995) The Original Roget's Thesaurus, Longman.
Knowles, E. and Elliott, J. (eds) (1997) The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, Oxford University Press.
Kurath, H. and Kuhn, S.M. (1954) Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan Press.
Landau, S.I. (1989) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, Cambridge University Press.
Landau, S.I. (1999) ‘Review of The New Oxford Dictionary of English’, International Journal of Lexicography, 12(3), 250–257.
Landau, S.I. (2001) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, second edition, Cambridge University Press.
Lehrer, A. (1974) Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure, North Holland Publishing Co.
Lyons, J. (1977) Semantics, vols 1 and 2, Cambridge University Press.
McArthur, T. (1986) Worlds of Reference, Cambridge University Press.
McArthur, T. (ed.) (1992) The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford University Press.
McArthur, T. (1998) Living Words: Language, Lexicography and the Knowledge Revolution, University of Exeter Press.
McLeod, I. (ed.) (1990) The Scots Thesaurus, Aberdeen University Press.
McMillan, J.B. (1949) ‘Five College Dictionaries’, College English, 10(4), 214–221.
Masuda, H. et al. (1994) ‘Review of the Longman Dictionary of the English Language 1991 edition’, International Journal of
Lexicography, 7(1), 31–46.
Morton, H.C. (1994) The Story of Webster's Third: Philip Gove's Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics, Cambridge University Press.
Mugglestone, L. (2000a) ‘“Pioneers in the untrodden forest”: The New English Dictionary ’ in L. Mugglestone (ed.), 1–21.
Mugglestone, L. (ed.) (2000b) Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest, Oxford University Press.
Murray, K.M.E. (1977) Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, Yale University Press.
Nesi, H. (1999) ‘A user's guide to electronic dictionaries for language learners’, International Journal of Lexicography, 12(1), 55–66.
Norri, J. (1996) ‘Regional labels in some British and American dictionaries’, International Journal of Lexicography, 9(1), 1–29.
Norri, J. (2000) ‘Labelling of derogatory words in some British and American dictionaries’, International Journal of Lexicography, 13(2),
71–106.
Nuccorini, S. (1992) ‘Monitoring dictionary use’ in H. Tommola et al. (eds) Euralex ’92 Proceedings, University of Tampere, Finland,
89–102.
Osselton, N. (1989) ‘The history of academic dictionary criticism with reference to major dictionaries’, article 27 in F.J. Hausmann et
al., 225–230.
Palmer, H.E. (1938) A Grammar of English Words, Longmans Green.
Pearce, D.W. (1992) Macmillan Dictionary of Modern Economics, fourth edition, ELBS/Macmillan.
Paikeday, T.M. (1993) ‘Who needs IPA?’, English Today, 9(1), 38–42.
Prčic, T. (1999) ‘The treatment of affixes in the “big four” EFL dictionaries’, International Journal of Lexicography 12(4), 263–279.
Pruvost, J. (2000) ‘Des dictionnaires papier aux dictionnaires électroniques’, International Journal of Lexicography 13(3), 187–193.
Reddick, A. (1990) The Making of Johnson's Dictionary 1746–1773, Cambridge University Press.
Ripfel, M. (1989) Wörterbuchkritik. eine empirische Analyse von Wörterbuchrezensionen, Lexicographica Series Maior, no. 29, Max
Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen.
Le Robert Collège (1997) M.-H. Drivaud (ed.) Dictionnaires Le Robert, Paris.
Roberts, J. , Kay, C. and Grundy, L. (1995) A Thesaurus of Old English, King's College London.
Rundell, M. (1998) ‘Recent trends in English pedagogical lexicography’, International Journal of Lexicography, 11(4), 315–342.
Rundell, M. and Stock, P. (1992) ‘The corpus revolution’, English Today, 8(2), 9–14; 8(3), 21–31; 8(4), 45–51.
Scholfield, P. (1999) ‘Dictionary use in reception’, International Journal of Lexicography, 12(1), 13–34.
Simpson, J.A. (1989) ‘Nathaniel Bailey and the search for a lexicographical style’ in G. James (ed.), 181–191.
Sinclair, J.M. (ed.) (1987) Looking Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing, Collins ELT.
Skeat, W.W. (1961) A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Sledd, J. and Ebbitt, W.R. (eds) (1962) Dictionaries and THAT Dictionary, Scott, Foresman and Company.
Starnes, DeW.T. and Noyes, G.E. (1991) The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson 1604–1755, new edition, G. Stein (ed.),
John Benjamins.
Stein, G. (1985) The English Dictionary before Cawdrey, Lexicographica Series Maior, no. 9, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen.
Steiner, R.J. (1984) ‘Guidelines for reviewers of bilingual dictionaries’, Dictionaries, Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America,
11(4), 315–342.
Svartvik, J. (ed.) (1996) Words: Proceedings of an International Symposium, Lund, 25–26 August 1995, Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och
Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser 36, Stockholm.
Svensén, B. (1993) Practical Lexicography: Principles and Methods of Dictionary-Making, translation of Swedish original published in
1987, Oxford University Press.
Tomaszczyk, J. (1988) ‘The bilingual dictionary under review’ in M. Snell-Hornby (ed.) ZüriLEX ’86 Proceedings, Francke Verlag,
289–297.
Weekley, E. (1967) An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, Dover, New York.
Wells, J.C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, second edition, revised, Longman.
West, M.P. (1953) A General Service List of English Words, Longmans Green.
West, M.P. (1964) A Dictionary of Spelling: British and American, Longman.
West, M.P. and Endicott, J.G. (1935) The New Method English Dictionary, Longmans Green.
Wiegand, H.E. (1994) ‘Wörterbuchkritik. Zur Einführung’ in F.F.M. Dolezal et al. (eds), 1–7.
Wilson, M. (ed.) (1957) Johnson: Prose and Poetry, Hart-Davis.
Winchester, S. (1999) The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Penguin.
Zgusta, L. (1971) Manual of Lexicography, Academia, Prague/Mouton, The Hague.