It is very important for us as linguists to have a useful and efficient dictionary. In this case, Longman Dictionary has everything to satisfy even the most captious person.
There are a lot of things which you can research, when you open the dictionary at first. This isn’t a simple handbook which includes only words and their definitions, but also encyclopedic information like geographical names with pictures and historical data, different holidays, articles about famous people (for example, Michael Jordan, Vanessa Mae, Joseph Addison), international organizations and so on.
As for the article, it contains various meaning of a word, British and American pronunciation, spelling, variants of a word. Cultural Notes give additional information about things that native speakers associate with the word. Also you can see quotations from well-known poems, novels, plays. If you need more information you can see an arrow and the words see also, it is a reference which tell you about related articles. Idioms and Phrases are marked in black print. Usage shows you various applications and indicates the correct choice of the word. Italic letters point grammatical categories whether a word is countable, uncountable, transitive, etc.
As for me Longman Dictionary is also good for supplementary information about Great Britain and America: political and educational system, national festivals, holidays, famous writers and musicians, film stars and many other things.
So, I think you won’t regret if this book is your daily helper.
Della Summers said that Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture “gets to the heart of the language”.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Good description of the dictionary for those who are not familiar with it!
Something to add: give a specific example of using this dictionary to find the meaning of the word you needed for the purpose of making the dictionary's best features stand out.
I would like to show you some specific features of my dictionary. You can see the usage of the word and make the correct choice in a particular situation. For example, compare cause and make. Cause can be formal or informal: Cigarettes may cause cancer | Why do you always cause so much trouble? Cause something to do something is formal: The earthquake caused several buildings to collapse. Make has a similar meaning, but is used more in conversation, and is used in the pattern make someone do something: It’s a sad film; it’ll make you cry. Also you can get extra information from cultural note, for example, cultural note about chimpanzee: In British Zoos in the past, chimps were often dressed in clothes, sat at tables, and given food to have a chimpanzees’ tea party for people to watch, but now this is felt to be cruel. As for me , famous quotations from well-known plays, poems, speeches enrich my knowledge in literature. You can meet the word candle from Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth” when the character is talking about how short and meaningless our lives are: “Out, out brief candle!” It is interesting to find out some pictures on the pages of the dictionary that characterize the meaning of the word. There are different maps, full-pages illustrations, tables in the middle of the book which give us information about Great Britain and the USA. The rest of the features can be similar to any other dictionaries. If you want to broad your mind and to have a good dictionary, Longman dictionary is indispensable book for your educational purposes. For more details click here :) http://www.longman.com/dictionaries
It's my favorite dictionary. It's always at hand and when I'm at work I take it to classes. I can't think of anything it does not have.
It's great you are using it!
Are you going to present it in class?
Post a Comment