As I suggested in the review, one of the real strengths of this dictionary is the flexibility of its search options. I’ll give you some specifics now, focussing especially on aspects of the search functionality. The review that I wrote for it sums up its plusses: I tried six of them the best was Dictionnaire français, by Farlex.
One of them has also solved my problem of needing to have a monolingual French dictionary once in a while.
#MONOLINGUAL APP DOWNLOAD#
Other apps let me download maps, manage my packing lists, write emails, etc. Smartphone to the rescue: with a Kindle app, I can buy new things to read as I need them. For example, when I went to France for the first time, I started packing my suitcase and immediately ran into a problem: 50% of my luggage was going to be taken up by books. Indeed, my phone is the thing that makes my life of flying from continent to continent possible. The smartphone, though–that’s something that was immediately obviously a good idea. Not despite the fact that I work in technology, but because I work in technology, I never expect anything to work. With those aspects of the definitions in hand, I could go look at actual examples of usage, and see what kinds of things can be the subjects of those verbs–for example, scintiller is often used with stars or to describe the night sky.) I had to go to a monolingual French dictionary to find out that chatoyer necessarily involves reflection, scintiller necessarily involves intermittence, etc. As a point of reference: English is my native language, and I scored in the top 1 percentile on the vocabulary portion of the GRE. Finding the English translations didn’t really help, because some of those can be translated by the same words in English, and I couldn’t swear that I can completely differentiate between the words in English, either. (Case in point: recently I was trying to figure out the distinctions between some words referring to light- chatoyer, scintiller, briller, stuff like that. English-French/French-English dictionaries will get you a long way, and often they suffice, but sometimes you really do need a monolingual dictionary of whatever language it is that you’re interested in. Īt some point in your study of a language, you need a monolingual dictionary of that language. As Wikipedia puts it: The word dictionary (unqualified) is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary. One of the basic distinctions between kinds of dictionaries that you’re likely to be interested in if you’re reading a blog like this one is that between monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.Ī monolingual dictionary gives the meanings of words in some language by providing definitions in that language itself. In fact, I have lots of different kinds of dictionaries. That doesn’t mean that I don’t own and use them, though–a lot of them. It includes links to many other pieces on the topic, including an interview with the amazing Deborah Cameron. Picture source: draft of a paper by me.ĭictionaries have more problems than just their definitions. Here’s a list of problems with dictionary definitions alone from a draft of a paper of mine: Some problems with definitions in dictionaries. They’re the bane of our existence, really–these things that Linguistics 101 students appeal to in defense of the crap explanations of how language works that they learnt in some grade school “English” class. Despite what you might expect: linguists hate dictionaries.
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