Dictionaries Directory

Dictionary is a reference book containing an alphabetical list of words, with information given for each word, usually including meaning, pronunciation, and etymology. It is a book listing the words of a language with translations into another language. A dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with their glyphs, or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. In some languages, words can appear in many different forms, but only the lemma form appears as the main word or headword in most dictionaries. Many dictionaries also provide pronunciation information; grammatical information; word derivations, histories, or etymologies; illustrations; usage guidance; and examples in phrases or sentences. Dictionaries are most commonly found in the form of a book.

Dictionaries have had a variety of means of expressing the means of pronouncing words in those languages that are not entirely phonetic. Three different methods are common. The earliest was simply to indicate the syllables that have greater stress using accent marks, such as in Samuel Johnson's eighteenth century dictionary. Here the accent mark followed the stressed syllable. This is analogous to the tonal marks for Chinese or the accent nucleus for Japanese. Regular languages such as Spanish do not need any special marking for this purpose.

There are many different types of dictionaries, including bilingual, multilingual, historical, biographical, and geographical dictionaries.