Scope and Organization on Longman Dictionary of English Idioms
and Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, Volume 2
刘子辉
Chapter 2 still mentions about the history of learners’ dictionaries. The
author has list several learners’ dictionaries as examples to describe the
tendency of lexicology, therefore, I just chose Longman Dictionary of
English Idioms (LDEI) and Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic
English, Volume 2 (ODCIE 2) , the two famous and well-known
dictionaries as an illustration to express my opinion about comprehension
of scope and organization.
Generally speaking, arranging the orders of collocations is a rather
tough task for the lexicographers, because there are quite a few words in a
collocation, and which word should be considered as a key word chosen
as an entry is still a great problem for the experts to solve. It is widely
known that these two dictionaries have good reputations among the
various readers. One of the reasons is that the structure of the dictionary,
which indicates that orders of entries are quite reasonable, logical and
acceptable. Another reason is that the lexicographers often think of
reader’s response. It means that they want to let more readers accept their
dictionaries as soon as possible, therefore when compiling a dictionary;
they would rather put the reader’s position at the first place. Let’s look at
their respective features on scope and organization.
According to LDEI，the lexicographers adopts three principles to
compiling a dictionary. The first ordering principle was that the first or
only noun of a combination (if it contained one) was treated as the
keyword under which the combination would be looked up, and was
made the capitalize heading under which all expressions introduced by
that word were grouped and defined. The second principle was that
entries gathered under a specific keyword should be arranged in strict
alphabetical order. Compilers of idiom dictionaries are also obliged to
introduce a mechanism whereby users looking up an idiom under a part
of speech other than the first or only noun will nevertheless be guided to
the appropriate main entry. The third principle was that under the
keywords and within the alphabetical arrangements for those keywords,
the user would fine the above-mentioned idioms containing and
cross-references to the headword.
With regard to ODCIE 2, the entries were arranged in strict
alphabetical order, taking account not only of major-class words such as
nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but also prepositions and indefinite
pronouns and determiners. The consequences of the approach were to
some extent mitigated by the inclusion of an index at the back of the
dictionary, in which groupings of items appeared under highlighted
keywords. Indeed it has been suggested that the organization of entries
could be improved first by including the index, with its keywords, in the
body of the dictionary text, and then by grouping main entries under
those keywords, according to the first or only open-class word which they
contain.
Above is what I have learnt in this chapter. Because my postgraduate
paper describes the compiling a dictionary, it is still necessary for me
learn the structures of dictionaries.