Some proper names are also listed in both the body and the appendices, e.g., Yvonne, Yugoslavia.
They all have the following collocations: a capital / large / upper case X, a small / little / lower case x. The most striking example can be found in the entries on letters of the alphabet, a, b, c, etc. Moreover, there is a good deal of repetition in the dictionary : the same word combination may be entered under all its components, or the same collocations may be repeated. The print is large and not cramped on the page. ECD is really a large dictionary, and the editors were apparently not constrained by limitations of space. This can be traced back to COD, as CED is "American-like" in having nominal compounds as main entries. ECD is said to have about 100,000 entries, though the actual number of lexical items is higher, as with compounds the nesting arrangement is often used. All this means that the word-list in ECD is quite extensive, fully comparable to that in standard desk monolingual dictionaries. The makers of ECD also made thenown excerption to supplement the data of monolingual dictionaries. It must be added, however, that the description in ECD is quite different from that in CED.
Indeed, the word-list in ECD is mostly similar to that in CED, though some of the items from COD not included by CED have been retained (e.g., gaddi,) while ECD omits rarely used archaic and dialect items from CED (e.g., fyrd, gadzooks). It contains the most important dictionaries of the English language, the latest being the Collins Dictionary of the English Language. At first the Concise Oxford Dictionary provided the basic wordlist (5th, later 6th, edition).2 The list of other dictionaries used for ECD is quite impressive. It is the third big bilingual dictionary published in Bohemia. 232Reviews It took about twenty years to make this dictionary. But before I take up this point, let me discuss ECD generally. It seems obvious that such bilingual dictionaries should be reviewed by criteria used in evaluating monolingual dictionaries interestingly enough, this dictionary has some features that are considered to be more characteristic of monolingual than bilingual dictionaries, even though description of one natural language by means of another is certainly more difficult than description in the same language. The editors explicitly state as much in the preface (5). The New EnglishRussian Dictionary1 is such a work, and the dictionary under review here seems to belong to this category as well. Dictionary makers in some of these countries seem to understand this situation clearly: they produce huge bilingual dictionaries that are to serve for comprehension. This is the case of Central European countries, such as Czechoslovakia or Poland, or the Soviet Union. There are also countries in which it is rather difficult to buy dictionaries published outside, and those who use a foreign language there will predominantly rely on bilingual dictionaries. The bilingual dictionary, it appears, can be the fastest comprehension dictionary for foreign users. Yet for them it has obvious advantages: the information is received in the foreigner's own language, and, because ofthat, this information is more quickly absorbed. Not so long ago the use of a bilingual dictionary was considered to be wrong, and foreign users were discouraged from using one. A foreign speaker, however, may use either a monolingual or a bilingual dictionary. A native speaker has monolingual dictionaries for that purpose. A very important function of a general dictionary is to serve as a comprehension dictionary, used in reading texts. REVIEWS Reviews231 English-Czech Dictionary. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
0 kommentar(er)
