For Students
Arts & Culture
dictionary
reference work
Also known as: lexicon
Nathan Bailey's definition of “oats”
Category:
Arts & Culture
- Related Topics:
- lexicography
- Who’s Who
- gradus
- thesaurus
- encyclopaedic dictionary
dictionary, reference book that lists words in order—usually, for Western languages, alphabetical—and gives their meanings. In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide information about their pronunciation, grammatical forms and functions, etymologies, syntactic peculiarities, variant spellings, and antonyms. A dictionary may also provide quotations illustrating a word’s use, and these may be dated to show the earliest known uses of the word in specified senses. The word dictionary comes from the Latin dictio, “the act of speaking,” and dictionarius, “a collection of words.” Although encyclopaedias are a different type of reference work, some use the ...(100 of 11101 words)