The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography

This is a down-to-earth, 'how to do it' textbook on the making of dictionaries. Written by professional lexicographers with over seventy years' experience between them, the book presents a step-by-step course for the training of lexicographers in all settings, including publishing houses, colleges, and universities world-wide, and for the teaching of lexicography as an academic discipline. It takes readers through the processes of designing, collecting, and annotating a corpus of texts; shows how to analyse the data in order to extract the relevant information; and demonstrates how these findings are drawn together in the semantic, grammatical, and pedagogic components that make up an entry. The authors explain the relevance and application of recent linguistic theories, such as prototype theory and frame semantics, and describe the role of software in the manipulation of data and the compilation of entries. They provide practical exercises at every stage.The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography draws on materials developed by the authors over more than twenty years of teaching courses for publishing houses and universities in the US, Japan, Hong Kong and China, South Africa, Australia, the UK, and Europe. It will be welcomed everywhere by lexicographers, teachers of lexicography, and their students. It is also fascinating reading for all those interested in discovering how dictionaries are made.

ISBN 0199277710   Pages 552 ISBN13 9780199277711 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Oxford University Press   Weight (grammes) 951 Imprint Oxford University Press   Published in Oxford Format Paperback   Height (mm) 247 Publication date 19 Jun 2008   Width (mm) 174 Library of Congress 2008016902   Spine width (mm) 30 DEWEY 413.028   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		Acknowledgements
		Abbreviations and symbols
1		Introduction		1
1.1		What this book is about		1
1.2		What lexicographers do		2
1.3		How this book works		5
1.4		And finally ...		8
Part I		Pre-lexicography
		Introduction to Part I		15
2		Dictionary types and dictionary users		17
2.1		The birth of a dictionary		18
2.2		Types of dictionary		24
2.3		Types of dictionary user		27
2.4		Tailoring the entry to the user who needs it		35
3		Lexicographic evidence		45
3.1		What makes a dictionary 'reliable'?		45
3.2		Citations		48
3.3		Corpora: introductory remarks		53
3.4		Corpora: design issues		57
3.5		Collecting corpus data		76
3.6		Processing and annotating the data		84
3.7		Corpus creation: concluding remarks		93
4		Methods and resources		97
4.1		Preliminaries		97
4.2		The dictionary-writing process		97
4.3		Software		103
4.4		The Style Guide		117
4.5		Template entries		123
		More...

The authors deserve the highest praise for producing a unique account of best practice in modern dictionary-making, based on their extensive and highly successful experience. Their explication of the relevant theoretical notions is highly engaging, admirably clear (with only the rare exception), and at times even entertaining. Robert Lew, ELT Journal OGPL will no doubt make one of the standard reference books on corpus-based lexicography in the years ahead. Kazou Dohi, Lexicon ...eminently practical, but never avoids theoretical issues...a highly readable volume Geoffrey Williams, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics ...the most in-depth and up-to-date vademecum for how general dictionaries are compiled. Good job! Reinhard Hartmann International Journal of Lexicography The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography is a most powerful lexicographic book-length achievement...Rare are cases where science and art meet. Here is a instance! Gilles-Maurice de Schryver LEXIKOS 18

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