Is there just one dictionary? - FactzPedia

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Is there just one dictionary?


 

Is there just one dictionary?




There is more than just one dictionary, but in English, the Oxford English dictionary is the most reliable and well established.

Oxford dictionaries have been around for a very long time, containing around 600,000 words and 3 million quotations.

When Oxford embarked on creating their first dictionary, they estimated that it would take around 10 years to complete.

The word “ant” was reached after five hard-working years and they realized it was an ambitious task.

They began work in August 1879 and it wasn’t until 1928 that the final volume was published, taking them almost 50 years to complete.

Basically, a dictionary lists a set of words with information about them. The list may attempt to be a complete inventory of a language or may be only a small segment of it. A short list, sometimes at the back of a book, is often called a glossary. When a word list is an index to a limited body of writing, with references to each passage, it is called a concordance. Theoretically, a good dictionary could be compiled by organizing into one list a large number of concordances. A word list that consists of geographic names only is called a gazetteer.

The word lexicon designates a wordbook, but it also has a special abstract meaning among linguists, referring to the body of separable structural units of which the language is made up. In this sense, a preliterate culture has a lexicon long before its units are written in a dictionary. Scholars in England sometimes use lexis to designate this lexical element of language.

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