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parade float to promote Webster's International Dictionary

entry for the word harlequin from the ninth edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

Learn about the history of the dictionary, from Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictionary of the English language to the Oxford English Dictionary

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Arts & Culture

dictionary

reference work

Also known as: lexicon

Written by Allen Walker Read

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History

Nathan Bailey's definition of “oats”

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Category: Arts & Culture

Key People:: Samuel Johnson; Noah Webster; Frédéric Mistral; Ambrose Bierce; Elijah Bokher Levita

Related Topics:: Who’s Who; gradus; thesaurus; encyclopaedic dictionary; concordance

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dictionary, reference book that lists words in order—usually, for Western languages, alphabetical—and gives their meanings. In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide information about their pronunciation, grammatical forms and functions, etymologies, syntactic peculiarities, variant spellings, and antonyms. A dictionary may also provide quotations illustrating a word’s use, and these may be dated to show the earliest known uses of the word in specified senses. The word dictionary comes from the Latin dictio, “the act of speaking,” and dictionarius, “a collection of words.” Although encyclopaedias are a different type of reference work, some use the ...(100 of 11101 words)

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