A Practical Guide to the Dictionary

These are the points covered, with some examples of the exercises from each section that will help students to get the most from their Cobuild dictionary:

• Entries and guide letters

  Exercise

  Which letter has the most entries? ............. Which letter has the fewest entries? ............

• Running heads

  Exercise
  Put the word "account" between the appropriate running heads in the table below.
  age	................	aim
  accelerator	................	accumulate
  abolish	................	accelerate
  appear	................	aptitude

• Entry order

  Exercise

  Put this group of words into alphabetical order:

  philosophic, phase, PhD, phenomenon, phenomenal, philosopher

• Headwords and superheadwords

  Exercise
  Look at these superheadword entries and find out how many sub-entries they are divided into:
  can	.............	lead	.............
  close	.............	mean	.............
  down	.............	mind	.............

• Inflected forms and alternative spellings

  Exercise
  At which headword would you expect to find the following words?
  actress	...............	clearer, clearest	...............
  denied	...............	set	...............
  trekking	...............	winded	...............

• Definitions and meanings

  Exercise

  1. What sort of thing do people heed?

  2. Where do you find front-runners?

• Grammatical Labels

  Exercise

  1. What grammatical features do 'awake' and 'aware' have in common?

  2. How many phrases are listed in the entry for 'way'?

• Examples

  Exercise

  Go through the dictionary and, in the examples for the words in bold type, find:

  - something that you can be hooked on

  - an illness that strikes people down

• Style and Register

  Exercise

  Look at the definitions and style labels in the dictionary and find:

  - the usual American expression for a pack of cards

  - what slumber is

• Pronunciation and wordfinding

  n	n	not
  	gn	gnome
  	kn	knee
  	pn	pneumonia

  Look at the table above which shows alternative ways of spelling consonant sounds at the beginning of a word. List the different ways of spelling the consonant sound that the word below begins with. What word is it?
  

• Usage notes

  Exercise

  Answer the questions and then write down at which word you found the answer. The first one has been done for you.

  1. In cooking, do Americans talk about grilling meat?

  No, they talk about 'broiling' it. cook

  2. Is it possible to pass and exam and fail it?