A. What a good dictionary tells you: the basics
A good learners’ dictionary (in book form or online) can tell you about:
• Pronunciation: this may mean learning some symbols which are different from the letters of
the English alphabet.
• Word stress: often shown by a mark before the syllable to be stressed or by underlining or
bold type, e.g. /əd'venʧə/, /westən/, complicated.
• Usage: how a word is used and any special grammatical pattern that goes with it, e.g.
suggest + clause (not an infinitive) – I suggest you ring her right away.
(NOT I suggest you to ring her right away.)
B. Additional information
• Synonyms (words of similar meaning) and antonyms (opposites), e.g. mislay and misplace
(synonyms), friend ≠ enemy/foe (antonyms).
• Collocations (how words go together), e.g. the adjective firm is often used in these
collocations: firm commitment, firm grip, firm believer.
• Whether a verb is transitive or intransitive: catch is transitive and must have an object,
e.g. He caught the ball and threw it back to me; laugh is intransitive and does not need an
object, e.g. She laughed when I told her the news.
• Whether a word is used for people and/or things. In this entry for the adjective hurtful in
the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary online,
we can see that hurtful can be used about what
someone says or about someone:
• Word class (often as abbreviations n noun, adj
adjective, etc.), and whether a noun is countable or
uncountable.
• Information about how words are related to one another through meaning. The Cambridge
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary online allows you to see a visual display of the networks of
meaning for a word, as in this display for the adjective fascinating. The Visual Thesaurus
shows related adjectives.
hurtful /ˈhɜːtfəl/ adjective
causing emotional pain:
- That was a very hurtful remark!
- How can you be so hurtful?
The adjectives are grouped
according to meaning. This
can be very useful when you
are writing. If you want to
vary your use of adjectives,
you can look up the related
adjectives to see which one(s)
most closely express(es) the
meaning you need.
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