 |
The Merriam-Webster's Advanced Learner's English Dictionary ( ISBN 978-0-87779-550-6) is a dictionary that was published in 2008. It focusses on American English. It is distinctive in that it shows inflections for all word types, whether regular or irregular. For example, the regular plural -s for count nouns, three verb forms (third person singular, past tense, and gerund) and comparative and superlative forms for adjectives. Homographs for verbs and nouns are also given separate entries.
 | This article about a dictionary is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.
A thesaurus, sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings, sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea:
...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed
Literal and figurative language is a distinction within some fields of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.
A monolingual learner's dictionary (MLD) is designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language. MLDs are based on the premise that language-learners should progress from a bilingual dictionary to a monolingual one as they become more proficient in their target language, but that general-purpose dictionaries (aimed at native speakers) are inappropriate for their needs. Dictionaries for learners include information on grammar, usage, common errors, collocation, and pragmatics, which is largely missing from standard dictionaries, because native speakers tend to know these aspects of language intuitively. And while the definitions in standard dictionaries are often written in difficult language, those in an MLD use a simple and accessible defining vocabulary.
The term predicate is used in one of two ways in linguistics and its subfields. The first defines a predicate as everything in a standard declarative sentence except the subject, and the other views it as just the main content verb or associated predicative expression of a clause. Thus, by the first definition the predicate of the sentence Frank likes cake is likes cake. By the second definition, the predicate of the same sentence is just the content verb likes, whereby Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. Differences between these two definitions can lead to confusion.
Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and American spelling. Many of the differences between American and British English / Commonwealth English date back to a time before spelling standards were developed. For instance, some spellings seen as "American" today were once commonly used in Britain, and some spellings seen as "British" were once commonly used in the United States.
A parley refers to a discussion or conference, especially one designed to end an argument or hostilities between two groups of people. The term can be used in both past and present tense; in present tense the term is referred to as parleying. In some cases, opposing parties would signal their intent to invoke parley by using a white flag, however the use of a white flag to invoke or request parley is not considered mandatory.
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Russian. The process of determining the lemma for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary.
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into
The advanced learner's dictionary is the most common type of monolingual learner's dictionary, that is, a dictionary written in one language only, for someone who is learning a foreign language. It differs from a bilingual or translation dictionary, a standard dictionary written for native speakers, or a children's dictionary. Its definitions are usually built on a restricted defining vocabulary. "Advanced" usually refers learners with a proficiency level of B2 or above according to the Common European Framework. Basic learner's dictionaries also exist.
In grammatical terminology, a subject complement is a predicative expression that follows a linking verb (copula) and that complements the subject of a clause by either renaming or describing it. It completes the meaning of the subject. In the former case, a renaming noun phrase such as a noun or pronoun is called a predicative nominal. An adjective following the copula and describing the subject is called a predicative adjective. In either case the predicative complement in effect mirrors the subject. Subject complements are used with a small class of verbs called linking verbs or copulas, of which be is the most common. Since linking verbs are intransitive, subject complements are not affected by any action of the verb. Subject complements are typically neither clause arguments nor adjuncts. A predicative complement can be either a subject complement or an object complement.
The ditto mark is a shorthand sign, used mostly in hand-written text, indicating that the words or figures above it are to be repeated.
English prepositions are words – such as of, in, on, at, from, etc. – that function as the head of a prepositional phrase, and most characteristically license a noun phrase object. Semantically, they most typically denote relations in space and time. Morphologically, they are usually simple and do not inflect. They form a closed lexical category.
Mohave or Mojave is the native language of the Mohave people along the Colorado River in northwestern Arizona, southeastern California, and southwestern Nevada. Approximately 70% of the speakers reside in Arizona, while approximately 30% reside in California. It belongs to the River branch of the Yuman language family, together with Quechan and Maricopa.
Challan or Chalan is a common Hindi word that has become an Indian English technical word used officially in many professional, especially financial transactions. It usually means an official form or receipt of acknowledgement or other kind of proof document, piece of paperwork, police citation, etc. According to American Merriam-Webster Dictionary "Chalan" means voucher or invoice. Similarly, British-English Dictionary Lexico also defines Challan as noun, "an official form or document, such as a receipt, invoice, or summons," and verb, "issue (someone) with an official notice of a traffic offence" and gives several examples of their applications, which are also paralleled by the Oxford Learner's Dictionary's two separate entries on the same. Wiktionary also gives examples of the application of the word challan in southeast Asia, including its use as a verb with challaning and challaned used similarly in context and meaning to police ticketing or someone being ticketed. While most of the dictionaries talk about the meaning representing a monetary penalty which is true in most real cases, Collins English Dictionary goes one step further and defines the verb part of the meaning of Chalan as "verb (transitive), to cause to appear before a magistrate," which in reality happens only in a subset of cases of Challan when a person misses paying the Challan and the matter moves to the next step of receiving a summon from a court.
In etymology, back-formation is the process or result of creating a new word via inflection, typically by removing or substituting actual or supposed affixes from a lexical item, in a way that expands the number of lexemes associated with the corresponding root word. The resulting is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889.
Some of the most notable differences between American English and British English are grammatical.