The Typology of Dictionaries

English lexicography is probably the richest in the world with re­spect to variety and scope of the dictionaries published, every educated person is supposed to consult a dictionary regularly, to develop the so-called ‘dictionary habit’. Dictionaries may be classified under different heads.

1.According to the object of description:

· Encyclopedic dictionariesare scientific reference books dealing with every branch of knowledge, or with one particular branch, usually in alphabetical order, e.g. the Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia, Random House Webster’s Biographical Dictionary.

Encyclopedic dictionariesare thing books, that give information about objects of extra linguistic world, they deal with concepts, their relations to other objects and phenomena; they have special entries for individual people and for places, they include supplementary features giving a wide range of general information like the name of the highest mountains and the famous lakes. The best-known encyclopedias of the English-speaking world are the Encyclopaedia Britannica (24 volumes); the Encyclopedia Americana (30 volumes);

· Linguistic dictionaries are word books that deal with the lexical units of the language and their properties – pronunciation, usage, etymology, meaning, peculiarities of use and other linguistic information.

Linguistic dictionaries can be further subdivided into different categories by different criteria.

2.According to the number of words (volume):

· Big academic dictionaries; E.g. The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; 470, 000 entries;

· Medial-sized dictionaries; E.g. The New English-Russian Dictionary in 2 volumes (I.R. Galperin); 150, 000 entries;

· Small dictionaries (in one volume); E.g. English-Russian Dictionary (V.K. Müller); 53, 000 entries.

3.According to the language of description:

· Monolingual dictionaries– in them the words and the information about them are given in the same language; E.g. Webster’s New World Dictionary in one volume, 160, 000 entries

· Bilingualthese dictionaries give equivalent words in two or more

· Polyglotlanguages, they do not define the words they list.

They may have two principal purposes: reference for translation and guidance for expression. Bilingual and polyglot dictionaries must provide an adequate translation of every item in the target language and expression in the source language.