Other languages

I have concentrated here on the history of dictionary-making in English, but the same points might be made with respect to dictionaries of French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, or Central Alaskan Yup’ik. All dictionaries are products of individuals and all display the choices and idiosyncrasies of those individuals in some way or another.

Dictionaries of other languages might be organized quite differently from those of the Indo-European languages that we are most familiar with, however. For example, dictionaries of Mandarin Chinese are not alphabetized in the way that dictionaries of English and French are, because Chinese is not written in the Roman alphabet. Instead, the writing system (or orthography) of Chinese is logographic or wordbased. Each word in Chinese is represented by a single character (or sometimes a combination of two characters). When you look up a word in a Chinese dictionary, you need to know how many strokes or lines make up that character. Dictionaries are organized from those characters made up of the fewest strokes to those containing the most strokes.

Dictionaries of other languages might include many fewer complex words than English dictionaries typically do. For example, if a language has very regular rules of word formation such that both the form and the resulting meaning of a complex word are perfectly predictable, the dictionary will have no need to list all complex words in separate entries. All it needs to do is list individual morphemes with their meanings (and perhaps some indication of how they combine). But the less predictable the form and meaning of complex words are, the greater the need to put them in the dictionary