Types of dictionaries - what exist and what are used for

According to scientists (linguists and psycholinists), for everyday life an average person "with a head" is missing about a thousand words. Nevertheless, the vocabulary of an educated European is about ten to twenty thousand. We are talking about active use, whereas we can know and understand about two to two and a half times more words. But as soon as a person is immersed in some specialty, the branch of knowledge, the topic - at least knitting or sawing - he needs also specific means of expression for this sphere. And if we constantly deal with documents - we just need a variety of types of dictionaries. Linguists and translators have a habit of using such reference literature - it's their specialty. The most popular types of dictionaries are first and foremost bilingual and multilingual - translating words into one or more languages. There are monolingual, and thesauri, and Dictionaries of a particular group. For example, foreign words, etymological (explaining the origin of the lexeme), sensible. All kinds of dictionaries of the Russian language are difficult to enumerate. If you need to know what a particular word or concept means, you should use an intelligent (for example, edited by Ozhegov or Dahl) or an encyclopedic dictionary.

However, not all words can be included in such publications: for example, they may not contain highly specialized terminology. In this case, such types of dictionaries are necessary, in which special (medical, technical, mathematical) terms are collected. And the meaning of idioms - well, at least "put off a long box" or "eat a dog" - we'll check the dictionary of phraseological units. Especially often such handbooks are needed for the translators of fiction and just learning a foreign language. After all, if in your native phraseology is understandable from context, then it can not be translated literally into English or German, preserving the meaning.

There are also so-called "reverse" types of dictionaries - if words are usually arranged alphabetically in the first, second and subsequent letters, for example, the rhyming dictionary represents the endings of words and the sorting goes in the opposite direction.

If we mention dictionaries of the Russian language, the kinds of which are very diverse, it is necessary to speak about both frequency and semantic dictionaries. In such reference books words are grouped according to the frequency of use or by thematic groups: from the core (the most important lexemes in this topic) to the periphery.

There are also such types of dictionaries as spelling: they can be used to check the spelling of a word, orthoepicheskie - with which the sound and pronunciation, dialectical (or regional), are checked, where the vocabulary of a certain territorial group is gathered (the so-called dialects). Neologisms, obsolete words - that is, those that either recently entered the language and have not been sufficiently mastered or used for a long time - are presented in the corresponding dictionaries (historicisms, obsolete words, new words). Finally, there are also types of dictionaries that represent the work of a particular writer or poet, with comments explaining the specifics of his use of certain words. These include, for example, "Dictionary of Pushkin's language", "Dictionary of Esenin's works" and others.