Make Your Way 6, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

Dictionaries, dictionaries …(I) Very often you hear people say: “Well, let’s look it up in THE dictionary,” implying that there is only one dictionary we could consider. Dictionaries, however, come in all shapes and sizes. If you wrote a list of books with the word “dictionary” in their titles, it would be a very long list, indeed. Top of the list – chronologically speaking – is Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which gives highly individual definitions of over 40,000 words. However, as this dictionary is more than 250 years old, it’s not so useful for the English language of today. The type of dictionary we probably all use most is the general purpose dictionary, usually a handy, monolingual dictionary in our mother tongue, which we keep on our desk or bookshelf for quick and easy reference. There is a wide range of general purpose dictionaries; these range from small compact pocket dictionaries to the ultimate in all dictionaries, The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which consists of 20 volumes (2 nd edition 1989) and costs around £1,800. Traditionally, words are listed alphabetically in dictionaries, but there are also dictionaries that group their material under categories, topics or by meanings. Such dictionaries are usually called thesauruses. Perhaps the most famous was first published in 1852 by P. M. Roget. Updated versions of Roget’s Thesaurus, which orders words by synonyms and antonyms, are still extremely popular. Another example of this type is the Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (1980), which lists words under certain topics (e.g. Birds, Friendship & Enmity, Drinks, Fear & Courage). As learning English has become so important in the modern world, there are a number of monolingual dictionaries especially designed for learners of English, for instance The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). The latest edition of the LDOCE (2009) includes definitions of words used differently in spoken English and shows which words are used most frequently in written and spoken English. This was made possible by computer technology. The first dictionary to make use of large databases was the COBUILD, a British research facility set up at the University of Birmingham in 1980 and funded by Collins publishers Today, their database, The Bank of English ® , contains more than 200 million words. You can access a database of 20 million words for free over the Internet. Two more interesting developments appeared in the Nineties. The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (3 rd ed. 2005) not only gives the meanings of 80,000 words and phrases, but also contains over 15,000 cultural and encyclopaedic entries. It would, for exam- ple, explain what soft skills are, or what the Hollywood Bowl is. One problem you face when using a dictionary is that it can be very difficult to choose the right word from words that appear to have the same meaning. Longman’s Language Activator (2 nd ed. 2004), which was called “the world’s first production dictionary”, helps you to choose just the right word or phrase to express your ideas. enmity: Feindschaft 157 3 Compact unit 3: “Words are all we have” Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv