A dictionary is fairly large collection of words, listed in alphabetical order, each followed by information about the word. This information contains, minimally, a definition, and usually certain other pieces of information standard for dictionaries.
Although various parts of the ancient world had something like dictionaries going very far back in history, modern dictionaries in Europe evolved in the late 16th and early 17th century from two kinds of reference works for readers: bilingual word lists and "hard word" lists. to be published in the 16th and 17th centuries, to help with all the new words entering into the European languages as borrowings (including new coinages and derivations) from Latin and Greek.
Other types of dictionaries that eventually followed were specialists' dictionaries that collected technical and specialist vocabulary from many fields, for example, medical dictionaries. Dictionaries began to become part of ordinary households only in the 19th century.
In the 1880s Oxford University Press began the New English Dictionary, an enormous undertaking that aimed to record all the words used in the history of the English language. It evolved into the Oxford English Dictionary.
In the later 20th century print dictionaries began to be put into electronic form for ease of updating and for scholarship purposes. In the 1980s electronic dictionaries became available on disks or pre-installed on hard drives; in the 1990s they began to appear on the web and have since proliferated.
Understanding dictionary entries
The following is an entry from the Oxford English Dictionary online, given verbatim.
Ginormous, a. [f. GI(GANTIC a. + E)NORMOUS a.] Very large, simply enormous; excessive in size, amount, etc. (esp. in comparison with one's expectation). 1948 in Partridge Dict. Forces' Slang. 1962 W. GRANVILLE Dict. Sailors' Slang 53/2 Ginormous, acronymous adjective descriptive of something really impressive: a brush with the enemy; a raid upon the enemy's shipping or coastline, or merely a particularly 'heavy' party in the mess. 1970 A. REID Confessions of Hitch-hiker vi. 45 We went to a posh cafe; ...The prices were ginormous. 1976 Scotsman 20 Nov. 10/2 How about froggies filled with pot-pourri from small to gi-normous, as Just Us describe them. 1977 Economist 8 Oct. 98/3 The state company Egam, declared bust last spring,..is going to cost considerably more than the 500 billion pounds...earmarked by the government last June, probably a ginormous 1,700 billion. 1986 Sunday Express (Colour Suppl.) 23 Mar. 70/3 Since Brands Hatch, doors have opened and it's possible to make gi-normous money.
The entry is composed of the keyword, its part of speech, the etymology, the definition, and a number of citations or quotations. These are the principle components of entries in most dictionaries. Many dictionaries also include a pronunciation, placed after the keyword and its part of speech.
The keyword is simply the word to be defined. Keywords are often used for cross-referencing in other words' definitions as well. Sometimes keywords are not whole words, but bound morphemes (-ism, anti- etc.), because sometimes people need to look up morphemes to see what they mean, too.
The part of speech gives some information about how the word is used in a sentence, i.e. its linguistic function. English has a part of speech system similar to that of most other European languages, with nouns, verbs and adjectives constituting the three major word classes, and three or more secondary, grammatical word classes like adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions.
In the ginormous entry, a. stands for adjective. This is part of the OED's space-saving abbreviations. Other dictionaries use Adj. or ADJ to make the part of speech more instantly recognizable. The following table shows abbreviations for parts of speech given in the OED and the corresponding ones typically used by linguists.
|OED||Linguists||Part of speech|
The OED labels ginormous as slang. This information is to help people use it appropriately. It would not be appropriate to use the word in a formal piece of writing or a formal address, for example. Usage labels include regional usage information (e.g. U.S. or U.K.), genres/levels of formality, and labels for whether the word is outmoded (e.g. the label 'archaic').
The etymology part, shown between square brackets, shows the source of the source: its formation and/or its path to English from other languages. [More to come]
The characterization of all the senses of a word that the OED has identified. These are numbered in the entry. The more numbered senses, the more polysemous the word is, in general. [more to come]
For each entry, the OED collects the earliest published citation that its editors and contributors can find.
What can we learn from the citations of ginormous? The word is fairly new in English, with its first citation found only after the second world war. It is old enough and widespread enough to have been noticed and collected by the OED, with numerous citations. From the first two citations, we learn that ginormous was, in its early years, British military slang (Partridge and Granville are two British slang collectors of the 20th century). Probably navy slang, since it appeared in a dictionary of Sailors' slang. The dictionary still considers it slang, as we saw in the usage label. The U.K. origin is supported by the usage label UK INFORMAL in the Freesearch online dictionary www.freesearch.co.uk.
Based on my own observation (S.K.), I believe the word spread from military to young people's slang in Britain and from there also to American youth slang. I first noticed it in Britain in the 1980s (in newspapers quoting pop musicians and other icons of youth), and heard it in the U.S. only in the mid-1990s. It is still spreading in the U.S. and still felt as a neologism, judging by the fact that numerous students have collected it in their Word Journals in recent years.
© 2005-2010 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 22 Aug 13