Introduction chapter. I. Fundamentals of english lexicography

Conclusion

Dictionaries play a very important role in linguistics and lexicography and in any sphere of activity connected to a language, because they are concerned with words. Dictionaries have become essential in the period of the Middle Ages and they stay essential for us nowadays. The people`s need in a dictionary is obvious. Whoever we are, simply common readers or tourists, scientists or linguistic students, we all need a good dictionary to guide us in the world of words because words of our own language as well as of a foreign one, are the significant part of our life. linguisDictionaries give us necessary information about words and each type of a dictionary is important in its own way as each of them represent one definite aspect of a word: its history, pronunciation, common usage, the notion it expresses or even its idiomatic sense. Some of its types were developed in the Middle Ages, some at the Renaissance period, and some have appeared in modern times, but without any single one of the types of a dictionary the language will become poorer and lose part of its diversity. The term dictionary is used to denote a book listing words of a language with their meanings and often with data regarding pronunciation, usage and/or origin. There are also dictionaries that concentrate their attention upon only one of these aspects: pronouncing (phonetical) dictionaries (by Daniel Jones) and etymological dictionaries (by Walter Skeat, by Erik Partridge, The Oxford English Dictionary). For dictionaries in which the words and their definitions belong to the same language the term unilingual or explanatory is used, whereas bilingual or translation dictionaries are those that explain words by giving their equivalents in another language.

Nowadays there is a great increase in the English vocabulary, related to the widening of the word stock and constant adding new words to it, and it is quite possible that this process will continue and there will be more new types of dictionaries because the world is constantly changing and become more and more global, and different nations are communicating with each other more through the Internet, enriching languages with a lot of foreign words and expressions.