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Dictionaries
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Shortcuts
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It is great
to see how much good lexicographic material is available online. Many
publishers provide free access to fairly comprehensive versions of their
reference works.
Yet even those sources that should be handled
with care (such as wiki-based bilingual dictionaries) can provide a
good stimulus for finding a translation equivalent you already know but
just cannot remember.
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Monolingual English dictionaries
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Oxford
dictionaries |
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The site www.oxforddictionaries.com
combines a vast range of monolingual and bilingual dictionary functions
provided by a household name. Currently my favourite. |
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OALD |
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Needless to tell any learner of English that
the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
is a classic - historically, it was
even the first real English learner's dictionary.
Now Oxford University Press has made a quite comprehensive electronic
version available online. |
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LDOCE |
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Its serious competitor, the Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English, can also be used online. It even contains the pictures
- but not the great collocation boxes, which makes it worth getting the
CD-Rom if you liked the internet version. |
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Merriam
Webster |
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Merriam Webster's
online dictionary contains somewhat more complicated definitions, but it
has the advantage of giving you the meaning of less frequent words, too.
This is because its main target group are native speakers of English. It
also offers a thesaurus, which helps
you to find synonyms and words related in meaning, and provides etymological
information, too. |
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American
Heritage |
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The American
Heritage Reference Collection, which also addresses a
native-speaking or very advanced target group, similarly not only provides
you with well-structured lexicographic
entries but also with a usage guide
that gives you advice on how to write "properly" in terms of
grammar, style etc. Even if you do not believe in prescriptivism, you may
sometimes want to check. :-) |
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Unusual
monolingual "dictionaries" |
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The
internet pages of large online shops such as Amazon
can be used like onomasiological dictionaries (i.e. dictionaries that start with the meaning and lead you to the form). If you are looking for a
' Pürierstab', find your way by first looking under the heading
"home", then e.g. "kitchen", and then refining your
search by clicking on the links suggested (e.g. food preparation
machines). In the end, several pictures of various products with corresponding descriptions
may lead you to the conclusion that stick blender
is a possible translation.
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Google
as a dictionary? Yes: if you have an idea what a particular word may mean,
check it in the picture search (which
works better, of course, if you are looking for a concrete rather than an
abstract concept). Then you will see whether hand blender is a good translation of Pürierstab or not. |
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Did you know that
Wikipedia has links between articles in different
languages at the bottom of the navigation bar on the left? By following them and comparing the descriptions, you can
not only find a translation equivalent but also check whether it is
precise enough for your purposes.
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Bilingual English/German dictionaries
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Bilingual dictionaries should ideally
only be used for inspiration and for finding a translation equivalent that
you already know but cannot think of temporarily.
However, there are situations in which this is
not possible. In order to make sure that you have really found the word
you were looking for, check it again in a monolingual dictionary
(or in the google picture search). This is particularly important in
the case of wiki-based dictionaries. |
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Collins
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The nice thing about the Collins
English/German dictionary is the fact that it was written by professional
lexicographers. It contains information on the valency
of its lemmas (e.g. whether to use a verb with infinitive to or
present participle -ing) and also shows the search term in
different typical collocations,
together with their translation.
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PONS
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The same is true of the dictionary by PONS.
Disambiguating information (e.g. Spitze eines Baumes top vs.
Nasenspitze tip) makes it a recommendable choice. In
addition, you can also search in a picture
dictionary that gives you the English and German parts of a
castle, for example.
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Linguee |
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Linguee is a mixture
between a dictionary and a corpus, since it uses bilingual online texts and
gives you a large number of English and German
sentences containing your word and potential translation
equivalents. Great, because you can choose which of the meanings in the
German example sentences corresponds to what you are looking for, and
because you automatically get the valency structures
in the English examples. |
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Leo
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Leo is the classic among
the wiki-based, user-generated online dictionaries, but the entries'
structure and information content could be improved. However, when you
click on the <i> box, you get a direct link to Merriam-Websters'
definitions, which is nice (but maybe you would prefer to check one of the learners'
dictionaries above instead).
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Dict.cc
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Dict.cc is comparable to
Leo in its design and has even more links in its <i> box.
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Beolingus
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Beolingus is provided by
the TU Chemnitz. The most interesting thing about this dictionary, which
is otherwise comparable to Leo and Dict.cc, is its pool of English/German
sentence equivalents, provided by the Goethe-Institut, and
which may help you with the formulation of your own text.
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Monolingual German dictionaries
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DWDS
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In their Digitales Wörterbuch der
deutschen Sprache des 20. Jahrhunderts (DWDS), the Berlin-Brandenburgische
Akademie der Wissenschaften has linked the six-volume Wörterbuch
der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (1952-1977) with information
from a balanced, representative corpus of 20th-century German. You can
even get collocation statistics for your search terms. In addition, you
will find etymological information basen on Wolfgang Pfeifer et al.'s Etymologisches
Wörterbuch des Deutschen.
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Duden
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German spelling is sometimes mysterious - particularly as
far as capitalisation and solid spelling are concerned. What better
reference tool could there be than one by Duden
itself?
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Uni Leipzig
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The site www.wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de
has almost become a household name, too. It offers not only brief
definitions and a semantic classification of search terms, but also their
synonyms, antonyms and collocations (based on statistical data).
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Grimm'sches
Wörterbuch
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The dictionary
by the famous brothers Grimm
(published between 1854 and 1960) is of course not entirely up-to-date -
but its online accessibility certainly is.
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Canoo
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You are
uncertain whether the Perfekt of winken
is gewinkt or gewunken? Then check www.canoo.net.
Not only does this trustworthy site offer you information on the
inflection of German words - but also on other aspects of grammar
and orthography (in
particular comma rules), based on the Amtliche Rechtschreibregeln.
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Grammis |
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The site Grammis,
by the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, offers users a
comprehensive account of German grammar. For instance, you can find out whether the German prefix -oid
produces only adjectives, and what parts of speech it combines with.
Grammis also comprises a dictionary of
grammatical
terminology. |
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Special dictionaries
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Linguistic
terminology |
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The Glossary
of linguistic terms by the linguistic association SIL
International provides a good overview of general linguistic terminology
that directs you to reference works for more detail. |
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The University of Utrecht also hosts a nice Dictionary
of Linguistics with brief entries. |
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Justo Fernández
López' Lexikon
der Linguistik und
Nachbardisziplinen is written in
German, as the title suggests. Relying very heavily on Hadumod Bußmann's
classic Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft and other reliable sources,
it represents a well-structured reference site that usually provides more
than a simple definition.
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For terminology from the field of phonetics
and phonology, the Speech
Internet Dictionary provides definitions, examples and
occasionally even sound clips. |
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Eva Schoenke's Glossar
der Textlinguistik is a very well-researched and well-structured
German-language glossary of text linguistics terminology. |
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Valency |
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If you are uncertain whether you may use a specific English word in a particular sentence structure, you now have the
opportunity to check in the Erlangen
Valency Patternbank, which lists all the valency patterns that
were identified for the 511 verbs, 544 adjectives and 274 nouns contained
in the Valency Dictionary of English.
Thus you will learn that the adjective alert
can indeed be used in the pattern adjective + in_V-ing.
The patterns at www.lexchecker.org
are less clear than those in the Valency Patternbank, but this is
counterbalanced by the fact that you get a large
number of examples from the British
National Corpus. |
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Roget's
Thesaurus |
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The world's most famous English thesaurus
is now online, too. |
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Acronym
finder |
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Have you ever wondered what WYSIWYG
means?
Find out on this site, which gives you the meaning of more than 750,000 acronyms
- even German ones, such as the famous ELSTER (= Elektronische
Steuererklärung). |
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Slang
dictionary
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Gives you an up-to-date account of British
English slang words.
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Base lexicale
du
français |
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This is a dictionary link collection
with a focus on English and German dictionaries. However, the Base
lexicale du français
is such a great database that I was unable to omit it. It
combines features of French dictionaries and
corpora, and it would be extremely desirable to have more
references of this type for other languages, too. |
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Link collections
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Erlanger
Liste |
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If the above is not enough for you, go to the
so-called Erlanger Liste, a vast link
collection (with a focus on German, though) that will provide you with
biliingual dictionaries for Indonesian, Russian and many other languages. |
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