Second edition

§ 6. The Selection
of Lexical Units
for Inclusion

It would be a mistake to think that there are big academic dictionaries that list everything and that the shorter variants are mere quantitative reductions from their basis. In reality only a dictionary of a dead language or a certain historical period of a living language or a word-book presenting the language of some author (called concordance) can be complete as
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far as the repertory of the lexical units recorded in the preserved texts goes. As to living languages with new texts constantly coming into existence, with an endless number of spoken utterances, no dictionary of reasonable size could possibly register all occasional applications of a lexical unit, nor is it possible to present all really occurring lexical items. There is, for instance, no possibility of recording all the technical terms because they are too numerous and their number increases practically every day (chemical terminology alone is said to consist of more than 400,000 terms). Therefore selection is obviously necessary for all dictionaries.
The choice of lexical units for inclusion in the prospective dictionary is one of the first problems the lexicographer faces.
First of all the type of lexical units to be chosen for inclusion is to be decided upon. Then the number of items to be recorded must be determined. Then there is the basic problem of what to select and what to leave out in the dictionary. Which form of the language, spoken or written or both, is the dictionary to reflect? Should the dictionary contain obsolete and archaic units, technical terms, dialectisms, colloquialisms, and so forth?
There is no general reply to any of these questions. The choice among the different possible answers depends upon the type to which the dictionary will belong, the aim the compilers pursue, the prospective user of the dictionary, its size, the linguistic conceptions of the dictionary-makers and some other considerations.
Explanatory and translation dictionaries usually record words and phraseological units, some of them also include affixes as separate entries. Synonym-books, pronouncing, etymological dictionaries and some others deal only with words. Frequency dictionaries differ in the type of units included. Most of them enter graphic units, thus failing to discriminate between homographs (such as back n, back adv, back v) and listing inflected forms of the same words (such as go, gone, going, goes) as separate items; others enter words in accordance with the usual lexicographic practice; still others record morphemes or collocations.
The number of entries is usually reduced at the expense of some definite strata of the vocabulary, such as dialectisms, jargonisms, technical terms, foreign words and the less frequently used words (archaisms, obsolete words, etc.).
The policy settled on depends to a great extent on the aim of the dictionary. As to general explanatory dictionaries, for example, diachronic and synchronic word-books differ greatly in their approach to the problem. Since the former are concerned with furnishing an account of the historical development of lexical units, such dictionaries as NED and SOD embrace not only the vocabulary of oral and written English of the present day, together with such technical and scientific words as are most frequently met with, but also a considerable proportion of obsolete, archaic, and dialectal words and uses. Synchronic explanatory dictionaries include mainly common words in ordinary present-day use with only some more important archaic and technical words. Naturally the bigger the dictionary, the larger is the measure of peripheral words,
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the greater the number of words that are so infrequently used as to be mere museum pieces.
In accordance with the compiler’s aim the units for inclusion are drawn either from other dictionaries or from some reading matter or from the spoken discourse. For example, the corpus from which the word frequencies are derived may be composed of different types of textual material: books of fiction, scientific and technical literature, newspapers and magazines, school textbooks, personal or business letters, interviews, telephone conversations, etc.
Because of the difference between spoken and written language it is to be remembered in dealing with word-books based on printed or written matter that they tend to undervalue the items used more frequently in oral speech and to overweight the purely literary items.