Using a dictionary

What is a dictionary?

When to consult a dictionary?

How to consult a dictionary?

Various reasons for consulting a dictionary

What is a dictionary?

A dictionary is a book, an application, or a website that lists words of a language in alphabetical order and gives their meanings in the same or a different language. The dictionaries that give meanings of words in the same language are called monolingual dictionaries. The dictionaries that give meanings of words in another language are called bilingual dictionaries.

When to consult a dictionary?

You do not always consult a dictionary to look up an unfamiliar word. Even familiar words have senses that you may not know! Let me make it clear with an example. Do you have a dictionary that has over 1500 pages? If yes, I hope this is a good dictionary. It must have a record of a good many words and their numerous senses – or the length alone is not a touchstone for the worth of a dictionary. Now look up the word go. How many senses does it have? I consulted the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries online at http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/go_1?q=go.
It returned 36 senses of this small, well-known word as a verb! I don’t know all of them – and it is a noun also! Fabulous, isn’t it! And the numerous phrasal verbs and idioms are apart from this – I didn’t bother to count them all.

How to consult a dictionary?

I usually consult a dictionary when I find some unknown word, or an unknown sense of a familiar word, in a particular context. Context means what I’m reading, or listening to, for example a movie – you can have your own context different from mine. Every word has a different meaning in a different context if it has more than one sense – and it is not uncommon for common words to have this quality. The aim of consulting a dictionary is to find the specific sense of a specific word in a specific context under consideration. So the sense is more important than the word itself, and you consult a dictionary to understand a particular sense of a word.

Here is how you reach the sense:

1. Every word has a base form. The base of glasses, for example, is glass; the base of trying is try; the base of calmly is calm. You have to look up the base even if you come across a derivative. Now, let us suppose you want to look up the word catastrophe.
2. The dictionary entries, as you read above, are listed alphabetically. Some dictionaries have a thumb index for this purpose, for example Webster’s New World College Dictionary. You can easily skip to where the words with a particular letter start, c in this case. If there is no thumbnail, even then some dictionaries have page margins marked with the entries letter. Or you can try your own guess: the middle has m or some other letter near it, the beginning has a, b, or c, and the part near the end has t – z. You should reach c to find catastrophe.
3. The facing pages of a dictionary have a word on the top of each page. These are called guide words. These help you know the range of words between the two pages. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has guide words for each page. The page that starts c has guide words by and caballero. Start tallying your word letter by letter with the guide words.

c

a

t

a

s

t

r

o

p

h

e

c

a

b

a

l

l

e

r

o

We can see that the third letter is t, but here we have b. T comes after b, so the required word must be ahead.

4. Some pages ahead have cassimere and castor-oil plant.

The third letter is t, but we have reached s. We are very near!

5. Go to another page ahead. It has castor sugar and cataphoric.

Great! We have matched four letters! We have reached p as the fifth letter, but we need s here. S is ahead of p – p–q–r–s – very near.

6. The next page has cataplasm and catechetical.

We have e where we wanted a. It means the last word on the page goes ahead of our required word. But in case of the first word cataplasm, the four letters match and the fifth letter p is behind s. So the conclusion is our word is on the same page. Let’s choose the second column, for instance. It has catch dead. The fourth letter of catch, that is t, is ahead of a, the fourth letter we are searching for. So the required word must be back in the first column.

7. A little below the top, we have catarrh – the first four letters match, but the fifth is r while we are searching for s – we must go ahead. Catarrhine, and then catastrophe. Eureka, we found it!

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11^th edition) lists 4 senses for the word catastrophe.

Suppose your sentence reads

Yemen is nearing a humanitarian catastrophe.

The first sense does not fit this sentence, nor does the second or third, but the 4^th sense does represent the meaning in this sentence.

Various reasons for consulting a dictionary

We do not consult a dictionary only to know what a word means in a certain context. Dictionaries help us:

• confirm the spelling of a word
• know where to break a long word at the end of a line
• know the grammatical/lexical category of a word
• know the inflections of words, like plurals or verb forms
• know the pronunciation of words
• know the register or area in which a certain word or its certain sense is used
• know word history, called etymology
• know derivatives
• know the use of words through illustrative examples
• know collocations, the usual combinations of words
• know synonyms and antonyms of a sense of a word

Last but not least, try to guess the meaning from the context. A person’s way of saying a word with a frown and high tone surely means they disliked something and were frowning at it.