Copy of `Macmilla Dictionaries - Dictionary Terms`

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Macmilla Dictionaries - Dictionary Terms Category: Language and Literature > Dictionary Terms Date & country: 28/08/2013, USA Words: 54

abbreviation
a short form of a word or phrase, for example: tbc = to be confirmed; CIA = the Central Intelligence Agency

antonym
a word that means the opposite of another word

collocation/collocate
a word that is often used with another word

compound
a combination of two or more words that is used as a single word. The three different types of compound are noun compound, adjective compound and verb compound.

concordance
a list of the words used in a text or group of texts. The normal way of consulting a corpus is to look at concordances which show words in the context in which they occur.

consonant
a speech sound made by stopping all or some of the air going out of your mouth

corpus (corpora or corpuses)
a collection of written and/or spoken language stored on a computer or on the Internet, and used for language research and writing dictionaries

countable
a countable noun is a noun that has a plural and can be used after a or an when it is singular

defining vocabulary
the words that are used to explain the meanings of words in a dictionary

definition
a statement of what a word or expression means

derivative
a word that is formed from another word, for example an adverb that is formed from an adjective by adding -ly

diphthong
a sound consisting of one or two vowels that is the combination of two sounds said one after the other

discourse
written or spoken language, especially when it is studied in order to understand how people use language

entry
one of the short sections into which a dictionary is divided. An entry explains the meaning or meanings of a word or expression.

example
a phrase or sentence in a dictionary entry that shows how a word or expression is used. It usually follows the definition.

frequency
star a ★ that indicates how frequently a word or expression occurs in English

frequency
the number of times that a word or expression occurs, for example in a corpus of English

grammar code
a label such as

guide
words in a paper dictionary, the two words at the top of a dictionary page that show the first and last words on that page

headword
one of the list of words in a dictionary, that is followed by an explanation of what it means

homograph
a word that is spelled the same as another word but has a different part of speech, and is therefore explained in a separate entry

idiom
an expression whose meaning is different from the meaning of the individual words

intransitive
a word describing a verb that has no direct object

lexicographer
someone whose job is to look at what words mean and how they are used, and to use this information to write entries for a dictionary

lexicography
the job or skill of writing dictionaries

meaning
the thing, action, feeling, idea etc that a word or words represent

menu b
ox a box at the beginning of a long dictionary entry showing a summary of that word

menu d
efinitions the short definitions used in the menu boxes

metaphor
a word or phrase that means one thing and is used for referring to another thing in order to emphasize their similar qualities

past participle
the form of a verb used to make perfect tenses and passive forms of verbs

past simple
the form of a verb used to express what existed or happened in the past

phrasal verb
a verb formed from two or (sometimes three) parts: a verb and an adverb or preposition

phrase
a group of words that are used together in a fixed expression

polysemous
a polysemous word has more than one meaning

pragmatics
the study of how people use language

prefix
a group of letters that is added to the beginning of a word to change its meaning

red word
a word that is shown in red in the Macmillan English Dictionary and which is one of the 7,500 most frequent words of the language

regional label
a label such as

semantics
the study of words and their meanings

sense
a separate meaning of a word or phrase. Entries for words that have more than one meaning are divided into senses.

stress mark
a mark that shows which part of a word is pronounced with more emphasis

style and attitude
labels labels such as

subject
labels that show that a word is used as part of a language of a particular subject and is not used in normal everyday English

subsense
a meaning that is very closely related to another meaning, and is therefore shown in the same sense as it

suffix
a group of letters added to the end of a word to make a different word

syllable
a word or part of a word that has only one vowel sound

synonym
a word that has the same meaning as another word

thesaurus
a book or a list that contains words that have similar meanings

transitive
a word describing a verb that is always used with a direct object

uncountable
an uncountable noun has no plural form and cannot be counted in individual units

usage note
a note at the beginning or end of an entry that gives information on the way words are used by people when they speak or write their language

vowel
a sound that you make when you speak without closing your mouth or throat

word
class/part of speech one of the main grammatical groups that a particular word belongs to according to the way it is used in a sentence, for example noun, verb, adjective, or adverb

World English Corpus
a 200 million-word corpus of real-life modern written and spoken English