About Unlucky Words in the Academic Dictionaries

Abstract

The article deals with the academic tradition of compiling dictionaries, incorporated and embodied in the authoritative lexicographical works of the mid XX century. Multi-volume alphabetical dictionaries of the Russian and Polish languages are analyzed from the point of view of information related to different levels of language structure and resting in the process of plotting and editing work for real and the potential vocabularies. Some solutions to the problem of an exhaustive selection of vocables from text sources for the choice of header words and illustrative quotations are proposed as the key to creation of fundamentally new academic publication of this type. Some new principles of token selection are offered. It is stated that the time has come to step over old and traditional for lexicographers approach to the line header choice and to reach the number of articles equal to half a million. The analysis allowed to find some gaps in the number of citations (every second unit of potential glossary on average); their inclusions can enlarge the academic dictionaries. The author criticizes the inconsistency and random selection of words as a false consecutive way to build a dictionary and claims that it deprives the user of some valuable information about semantic and grammatical richness of Slavic languages.

Keywords

• Slavic lexicography
• academic dictionaries
• vocabulary
• dictionary illustration
• header word