Course: Understanding English Dictionaries

“That dictionaries engage with the truth is a commonplace in the history of lexicography.” So says Lynda Mugglestone in her book Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (p 93). It may …

The two previous steps showed that there are many different ways of writing a definition. And as we saw in Week 2 (Steps 2.6 and 2.7), sometimes an image is …

We would like you to write definitions for four common words. You will have tried this before during Week 3 (Step 3.10), but by now you will have a better …

So far this week we have looked at the way meanings in the real world relate to the numbered ‘senses’ in a dictionary. Your task Look at the slides, available …

In this video, Michael Rundell interviews Patrick Hanks, a corpus linguist and lexicographer with a long and distinguished record. Watch the video interview which is approximately five minutes in length. …

The usage website Daily Writing Tips says: ‘The constant misuse of ‘disinterested’ for ‘uninterested’ is breaking down a very useful distinction of meaning’. Traditionally, the adjective ‘disinterested’ describes someone who …

Using the same corpus data as in the previous step, now we would like you to identify those clues in the context (syntactic, collocational, etc.) which led you to associate …

We would now like you to compare your ‘introspective’ findings about the word ‘party’ with some corpus evidence. Your task Compare the facts about ‘party’, which you assembled through pure …

Watch the video, which shows several people trying to answer the following question: How many meanings can you think of for the word ‘party’? What are those meanings (you can …

Introspection simply means thinking about what you know about a word. It involves consulting your own ‘mental lexicon’ – the information about words and language which is stored in your …

In this exercise, we’re asking you to compare the way a dictionary describes the meanings of a word, and the way the word is used in normal communication. For this …

This week is all about meanings and definitions, which many people see as the main function of a dictionary. If we think about it at all, most of us probably …

Have a look at the latest words in the Macmillan Open Dictionary. This is a crowdsourced dictionary, to which you can submit a new word, a new phrase or idiom, …

This Oxford Lexico article and this article from Merriam-Webster both explain how difficult it is to answer the question: how many words are there in the English language? One reason …

This week you have learned that: Not all the words in the English language are recorded in dictionaries New words (and new meanings for old words) come into the language …