In many languages, words can appear in many different forms but only the un-conjugated and typical forms appear as a headword in many dictionaries. Although words dictionaries are most commonly found in the form of a book, now you will find some newer dictionaries like Stardict and Oxford American Dictionary online, accessible via Internet.
A glance at the history of words Dictionary
The first known bi-lingual dictionaries were created in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest European dictionaries were bilingual dictionaries. You will find that these word dictionaries were simply a glossary of French, Italian and Latin words along with suitable definitions of foreign words in English. However, there is a confusion regarding the scripting of the first English dictionary.
Today you will find that many people still mistakenly believe that Johnson was the first one to have written the first English dictionary. This Johnson dictionary remained English language standard for over 150 years, until oxford university press began writing and releasing the Oxford English dictionary in short edition from 1884 onwards. It took nearly 50 years in completing, which in its modified form came into the market in 12 volumes in 1928. Since then, it remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day.
How words dictionary varies from each other
In most of languages, you will find that words are grouped together in accordance to their root words, and their roots being arranged alphabetically. This method provides you an advantage of listing the words of common origin. Words dictionary can vary widely in size, scope and coverage. You will find that maximizing dictionary lists as many words as possible from a particular speech community, whereas the minimizing dictionary attempts to cover a limited selection of words from a speech community exclusively.
If you see dictionary of Chinese characters, you will find that they include less pages and commonly used characters, while multi volume minimizing dictionary contains huge pages, characters and variants. Most of Japanese and Korean dictionaries are arranged according to their phonetic writing system to allow readers in finding their clues at ease.
You will find that there are millions of hard-to-define terms, which sound strange yet exciting enough. However, when you go through these words dictionary, you only find their real entity. So to conclude, we can say that finding the meaning of fuzzy, complicated terms is no more an uphill task for a child if such handy reference books lie in every child’s desk.