Dictionary

Every student, every writer, should have a well-thumbed desk dictionary on the work table or on a shelf nearby. A good dictionary is the essential tool for the task of making sense with words, whether you are writing a paper for English or a lab for engineering.

As a Canadian writer, you should possess, and become lovingly familiar with, a good abridged Canadian dictionary. Three dictionaries in particular are recommended, and are listed below in order from least to most expensive. (A good hardcover desk dictionary will be priced at forty to fifty dollars.)

The Gage Canadian Dictionary, Revised and Expanded (1997), holds an honourable position as the first dictionary, to quote its introduction, "truly to reflect standard Canadian usage throughout" when it was first published in 1983. Its general editor was the late Walter S. Avis, who for over 25 years served on the faculty of English at RMC. Written by Canadians for Canadians, it is the dictionary of choice for government publications.

ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary of the English Language (1997) has more entries than the Gage (160,000 words compared to 140,000); it is more thorough in its listing of Canadianisms; it contains biographical entries on personages of note throughout history, in particular famous Canadians, and is well complemented with photographs and detailed illustrations.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd Edition (1998) is a bestseller and the most rigorously researched of the three dictionaries. It contains over 2,200 distinctly Canadian words and meanings, including regionalisms and Aboriginal words. Like the Nelson, it has encyclopedia--like entries providing biographical, geographical, and historical information. Canadian pronunciations are based on actual socio-linguistic data.

A good desk dictionary can provide you with a wealth of useful information. Below is an illustrative dictionary item on the word soldier. Labelled items in the illustration are further explained in the paragraphs that follow.

Dictionaries must necessarily squeeze a lot of information into a single entry, so various symbols and abbreviations are used in order to save space. This can make a dictionary item somewhat difficult to read. In the opening pages of a dictionary you will find a key to abbreviations and symbols and sometimes an anatomized sample entry like the one above.

The Catch-22 of using a dictionary is that you have to know how to spell a word in order to look it up and confirm that you have spelled and used it correctly. If you are not sure how to spell a word, using a dictionary is a bit like playing lawn darts: you take a toss at your target word and usually end up landing close enough to it to discover what you were looking for. The dictionary's entry word usually appears with a centred period between each syllable. This is helpful information if you are typing and need to break a long word at the end of a line. If a word has two acceptable spellings, the dictionary will give both spellings at the beginning of an entry, with the most common of the two presented first. The ITP Nelson, for example, pairs the entry words maneouvre or maneuver— which few can spell correctly in either variation.

Most pronunciation symbols in dictionaries are baffling; the one at in the example above is about as simple as pronunciation codes get. Good dictionaries supply a pronunciation key at the foot of the page or in a box somewhere on two facing pages: for example, e symbolizes the pronunciation of the letter e in wet; zh symbolizes the sound of the s in vision. With some effort you can figure out what the symbols mean and pronounce the word correctly. Some dictionaries indicate which syllable gets the heavier stress with a mark like the one in the example above.

Further codes at indicate whether a given word is used as a noun (n.), verb (v.), adjective (adj.), or some other part of speech. In military parlance, there is a tendency to shift words from their established, conventional use, such as using a noun as a verb ("I have been tasked to transition this document, sir") or an adjective or adverb as a noun (Everyone was sad to learn that a friendly had been injured in the attack). These functional shifts are frowned upon by language purists and will most certainly get red-lined on your word processor. You won't find transition listed as a verb in a standard desk dictionary; military usage has influenced the acceptance of friendly and friendlies as nouns in informal usage only. So, be warned, and be informed by a dictionary.

The possible meanings of a word, at , are usually ordered with the most common given first, followed by other meanings that the word has acquired over time and use or in particular contexts. Some dictionaries indicate meanings that are particular to British or North American English. A biscuit is not the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic. Slang or informal uses of a word with special meaning (see at ) are included in a typical entry. Dictionaries also helpfully list idiomatic expressions—phrases that cannot be understood from the literal sense of words but have a shared meaning among native speakers (see at ). This information can be particularly helpful to those with ESL difficulties.

Finally, most dictionaries will give some sense of a word's origin or history, formally termed its etymology (the coded information at ). Knowing the etymology of a word can sometimes help you use it more precisely or identify for purposes of study other words that are related to it through largely Latin or Teutonic ancestors. Cryptically brief etymological notes can tantalize the reader with a snippet of an intriguing story on the social history behind a word: the derivation of the word soldier from Latin and French words meaning "pay," for example, indicates that a soldier was someone who fought for a wage. The word comes into use in an era when other fighters were obligated to perform military service for a feudal lord without receiving extra pay. All this can be learned from a common desk dictionary.