A Comparison between Oxford Advanced Learner’s
English-Chinese
Dictionary
and
Longman
Dictionary
of
American English
--By Peyton 李萍
According to the aspect of macrostructure, Oxford English-Chinese Dictionary
gives phonetic symbols on the 1st page, involving pronunciation of vowels and
consonants, followed by examples.
And it provides a list of working staff and shows the contents on the next page.
After that, its preface is expressed in English and Chinese, “Guide to the use of the
dictionary” in the following step. Note on trademarks and propriety status are the last
part of front matter. The words in the paperback of the Oxford English-Chinese
Dictionary are arranged in alphabetic order with appendices at the end composed of
countries of the world, famous people, alphabets, science, time and date, animal and
collective nouns as well as architecture.
The preface of Longman Dictionary is written in Chinese, followed by the table of
contents. The next page shows the readers the short forms used in the dictionary, then
grammar codes, guide to the dictionary for five pages. The last section of front matter
is dictionary skills workbook. The Longman Dictionary is compiled also in alphabetic
order. After the vital important part of the dictionary---the dictionary A-Z, we come
into back matter, where it supplies us study notes, answer key, wording building, list
of irregular verbs and pronunciation table.
In terms of microstructure, the paper Oxford English-Chinese Dictionary is
designed as the order of headword spelling, pronunciation, part of speech, verb in
flections, clear and simple explanation, and example of use, phrases and idioms,
derivatives, word origin, usage note, even with encyclopedic entries of necessary. As
for Longman Dictionary, it also contains the difference in spelling or pronunciation of
a certain word between English and American, providing synonyms and opposites,
and even listing the related words which are difficult to distinguish.