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One thing I always wanted was a paper dictionary that excluded the really common words. It'd be a lot faster to look up thaumaturge if I didn't have to sift thr
by Nition 9y ago
One thing I always wanted was a paper dictionary that excluded the really common words. It'd be a lot faster to look up thaumaturge if I didn't have to sift through the likes of that and the. Take say the 5000 most common words in English and leave them out.
Sure on rare occasions you'd look up something that was left out, but that already happens in the other direction (towards rare words) because that and the are taking up space where more difficult words could have been included. Smaller dictionaries often don't have the word I wanted, but do have a ton of words I'd never need to look up.
- my_first_acct 9y agoAccording to someone on Stack Exchange, quoting the NY Times, quoting the Chief Editor of the OED [1], 'there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings'. Other common words with huge numbers of meanings include "put" and "set". [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with-most-meanings https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with...
- Nition 9y agoAnd I'm sure some of those are obscure meanings, but the likelihood is I'm never going to look them up. Exclude those many definitions of "run" and either make the dictionary a bit smaller (easier to search) or include several rare word definitions in the same space.
- dragonwriter 9y agoRemoving a handful of thousands of common words won't make the OED noticeably shorter, and it's not space constrained anyway. And I don't think a rare use of a common word is any less likely to be looked up than a rare word.
- Nition 9y agoI don't mean the full OED. Personally I have a Pocket Oxford and a Concise Oxford. Both are space constrained. The Pocket Oxford in particular has around 60,000 words so leaving out the most common 5-10K would make a noticeable difference. Since it's the complex words that get left out in small dictionaries, as you decrease dictionary size, the size saving that you'd get from removing common words proportionally increases. But you might be right that it wouldn't make enough of a difference, since small dictionaries can also fit less words in total. It might never be enough to matter much.
- haZard_OS 9y agoI know this isn't exactly what you meant but I have found it surprisingly useful (and fun!): https://www.amazon.com/Thinkers-Thesaurus-Sophisticated-Alternatives-Expanded/dp/0393351254 https://www.amazon.com/Thinkers-Thesaurus-Sophisticated-Alte...
- mmjaa 9y agoI want exactly the opposite - to be able to construct dictionaries where there are no words used in definitions that don't also have their own entries. To me this is a key feature of a dictionary - definition completeness. And its one of the reasons I'd like to know about the toolset used to construct dictionaries - I'd give anything to be able to throw a word set at these tools, have a custom dictionary constructed from it, and repeat until unity...
- Nition 9y agoI actually assumed that was already a general rule, because any word I've ever cross referenced in a dictionary has always been there. In fact, in the diminutive "Little" Oxford[1] there are few enough words available for definitions that you can get stuck in a loop between two words! Although there's always at least one other synonym word in the definitions. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Little-Oxford-English-Dictionary/dp/B00A2KP7GA https://www.amazon.com/Little-Oxford-English-Dictionary/dp/B...
- mmjaa 9y agoI'd really love to know the technology behind lexicography, as a state of the art. If anyone works in this field, any pointers you might provide are highly appreciated. I understand that unity is a difficult thing to attain in dictionaries, but perhaps there are tools and methods used by lexicographers that I need to learn about, as an interested party.