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Unit 9: Dictionaries

Some of the leading publishers like McGraw Hill, Elsevier, Penguin, etc., have published Notes
popular series of subject dictionaries in various disciplines. They are the most well-known
sources of reference in the academic and special libraries.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
9. Dictionaries can be divided into ................................... categories according to their nature
and scope of contents.

10. The dictionaries, which are compiled for a special purpose of aspects of a language, are
called .................................... dictionaries.
11. .............................. is pithy one or two sentence, made as a remark by an eminent person in
course of lecture, speech or in a book of fiction or non-fiction.

9.4 Historical and Etymological Dictionaries

The diachronic or historical dictionary has a special class in it which can be called etymological.
Although its focus is also to present the history of a lexical unit, its form and purpose are totally
different from historical dictionary and it has a limited readership. Its word list is different from
the general dictionaries, even from the historical dictionary and in this regard it comes under
special type of dictionaries, described later.

The main function of both the historical dictionary and the etymological dictionary is to present
the history of a lexical item. The difference lies in their approach. The historical dictionary
records the development of a lexical item in terms of both the form and the meaning of the
particular lexical unit, whereas the etymological dictionary presents the origin of words by
tracing the present day words to their oldest forms.
The historical dictionary is concerned with a systematic study of changes affecting a lexical unit
during its life i.e. within a period from which there is evidence, e.g. in OED from the days of
King Alfred to the present time. In order to present these changes in the structure and meaning
of a word the lexicographer traces it back to its earliest available occurrence in the literature of
the languages and records its development in subsequent stages of the language. In order to do
this the lexicographer makes use of all the available works of the language. All the occurrences
of the lexical units in different contexts in all works are found out. These contexts are analysed
and compared with each other. By doing this, the lexicographer finds out the different senses of
a lexical unit and finer nuances of its meanings. Then these meanings and sub meanings are
arranged in chronological order. As for the forms, the changes in their shape are also recorded
chronologically. But this is by no means a simple task. The number of words in a language is
very large and changes in case of all the words are difficult to record in all their minor details.
Moreover, the semantic changes of individual lexical items are arbitrary and cannot be
generalized. As a result the lexicographer has to analyse a large amount of data to find out the
semantic changes of a lexical unit.
The problem arises as to whether a historical dictionary can cover all the works available in a
language and give all citations for all the lexical items. No dictionary, whatever are its resources,
can afford to give all this. The lexicographer has to choose some workable way for his dictionary.
In order to do this, works are at first listed. Then a selection of works as to which of them would
form the corpus of the dictionary is done. For selecting works for the dictionary, two
considerations govern the decision of the lexicographer: (1) time and (2) the subject or theme.
First, certain broad classifications can be made of the entire period. This classification is based
on some criterion like some landmark in the history of the development of the language

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