Types of dictionaries

The term “dictionary” is used to denote a book listing words of a language with their meanings and often with data regarding pronunciation, usage, origin.

	UNILINGUAL	BILINGUAL (MULTILINGUAL)
General	Explanatory dictionaries irrespective of their bulk	English-Ukrainian, Ukrainian-English etc. Multilingual dictionaries
	Etymological, frequency, phonetic, rhyming and thesaurus type dictionaries
Special	Glossaries of scientific and other special terms, concordances. Dictionaries of abbreviations, antonyms, borrowings, new words, proverbs, synonyms, surnames, toponyms etc.	Dictionaries of scientific and other special terms. Dictionaries of abbreviations, phraseologisms, proverbs, synonyms etc.
	Dictionaries of American English, dialects, slang.	Dictionaries of Old English and Middle English with explanation in Modern English

Unilingual or explanatory dictionary is the dictionary in which the words and their definitions belong to the same language. E.g.: “Oxford English dictionary” in 13 volumes (Oxford 1933).

Bilingual or translation dictionaries are those which explain words by giving their equivalents in another language.

Multilingual or polyglot dictionaries are not numerous, they serve chiefly the purpose of comparing synonyms and terminology in various languages. E.g.: “American Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in Principal Indo-European Languages” (Chicago 1949).

Unilingual dictionaries are further subdivided with regard to time.

E.g.: Etymological dictionary which state the origin of words “Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary”.

Both bilingual and unilingual dictionaries can be general and special.

General represent the vocabulary as a whole with a degree of completeness depending upon the scope and bulk of the book in question. They include frequency dictionaries, i.e. lists of words, each of which is followed by a record of its frequency of occurrences in one or several sets of reading matter. E.g.: “Semantic Frequency List for English, French, German, Spanish” (1940).

A rhyming dictionary is also a general dictionary, though arranged in inversive order and so is “Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases” in spite of its usual arrangement.

General dictionaries are contrasted to special dictionaries whose stated aim is to cover only a certain specific part of the vocabulary. Special dictionaries may be further subdivided depending on whether the words are chosen according to the sphere of human activity in which they are used (technical dictionaries), the type of the units themselves (phraseological dictionaries), relationships existing between them (dictionaries of synonyms etc).

E.g.: W.G.Smith “English Idioms” (1949) Crabb’s “English Synonyms Explained” Brewer “A Desk Book of Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases”

Special unilingual dictionaries which give definitions of terms (medical, technical, art, musical) are called glossaries. E.g F.P.Hamp “A Glossary of American Technical Linguistic Usage1957

Dictionaries recording the complete vocabulary of a particular author are called concordances. They should be distinguished from those that deal only with difficult words, i.e. glossaries.

Taking up territorial considerations one comes across dialect dictionaries and dictionaries of Americanisms.

Finally, dictionaries may be classifies into linguistic and non-linguistic. The non-linguistic are dictionaries giving information in all branches of knowledge – the encyclopaedias. They deal not with words, but with facts and concepts.

The best-known encyclopaedias of English-speaking world are:

“Encyclopaedia Britannica” “Encyclopaedia Americana”.

ENGLISH PHRASEOLOGY

Phraseological units are defined as non-motivated word groups that cannot be freely made up in speech but are reproduced in speech as ready-made units.

This definition proceeds from the assumption that the essential features of phraseological units are stability of lexical components and lack of motivation (idiomaticity).

E.g.: “red tape” – “bureaucratic method” – is semantically non-motivated, that is its meaning cannot be deduced from meanings of its components. It exists as a ready-made linguistic unit which does not allow any variability of its lexical components.

Stability of phraseological unit implies that it exists as a ready-made linguistic unit which does not allow any variability of its lexical components and grammatical structure.

Reproducibility is regular use of phraseological units in speech as single unchangeable collocations.

Idiomaticity is the quality of phraseological units when the meaning of the whole is not deducible from the sum of meanings of the parts.