6 Using your dictionary

Dictionaries are very useful tools for language learners. In this short screencast you will be acquainted with some of the information you can find in a dictionary.

There are 2 main types of dictionaries – monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.

Monolingual dictionaries explain the meanings of the words in the same language. That is a monolingual Spanish dictionary explains the possible meanings of a word or expression in Spanish.

At this point in your studies, you are more likely to use a bilingual dictionary. A bilingual dictionary translates words and expressions from one language to another, for example from Spanish to English or the other way round.

Nowadays most dictionaries we use are online dictionaries. You might be familiar with, for instance, the Collins online dictionary, or WordReference. Both are monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. The Cambridge, the Oxford, the Merriam-Webster dictionaries are also widely used.

In the OU library you can find useful dictionary and encyclopaedia resources to help you with your language learning. Let us look at it now.

Go to the Open University Library webpage and there choose the Library Resources. On the right hand side you can see ‘Dictionaries’ – click on that and scroll a bit down. You can see, for example, the Oxford dictionaries here. Click on that. Choose your language – in this case we will choose Spanish and we will see, for example, Spanish to English.

Let’s look at the word café.

If you search the word café you will see that it has 2 entries. Let’s look at it.

The first one says it’s an adjective. It says ‘usually invariable’. Invariable means it has only 1 form for both masculine and feminine. In this case we can see that it has 2 meanings, this adjective, invariable adjective: marrónclaro whichis coffee before a noun, but an adjective, like coffee coloured, for example: Vestido marrón or vestidocafé – coffee coloured dress. Or it simply means brown. Ojos café means someone has brown eyes. This was one entry.

The other entry is a masculine noun which also has 2 basic meanings. One meaning:

cultivo, bebida – this is a drink, simply a coffee

And you can see that you find also examples:

me sirvió un café – he gave me a coffee

And the other meaning is café, like a cafeteria, you know the place where you can drink a coffee, for example.

Now let’s go to WordReference and let’s check the same word, café, in WordReference.

So our word is café and we will look it up in the Spanish-English dictionary. As you can see there are many options, bilingual and as well as monolingual options. For example, Spanish definition is basically a monolingual dictionary.

So, let’s look at café and what we can see is that it has 2 entries again, not surprisingly. You can also see that WordReference shows the morphological category or categories of the word in abbreviated form. So here we can see ‘nm’ – ‘n’ standing for noun, and ‘m’ is masculine, so nombre masculine – it’s a masculine noun. Or it can be an adjective, just as in the previous dictionary obviously.

If you had here an ‘fm’ it would be a feminine noun, nf nombre feminine.

OK, so what are the meanings? The noun is:

bebida preparada por infusión – in English coffee

and here again you can see examples:

¿Te gusta el café negro o con leche? – do you like your coffee black or with cream?, for example.

And you can also see there is an adjective which means marrón, brown or coffee-coloured.

Here you also have some information of the geographical distribution of the uses of these words, in the sense of brown, it’s normally used in Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay etc.

You can also find information about inflexiones different forms of the word. So here can you say masculine plural is cafés. So you can see that the plural of the word is cafés.

To choose the right translation you should be able to identify the context of the word in the situation you want to use it. For example, it could be difficult to know what the meaning of café is without the context. So it can have obviously various meanings. So to choose the right one you might need to see examples of usage which dictionaries normally give or present.

WordReference also includes information on how a word or an expression is pronounced. There are 3 different varieties in the case of Spanish – you can choose the variety spoken in Mexico and Central America, Spain, and Argentina and Uruguay area.

And you can also choose the playback rate so you can play the word in a normal speed or a bit slower or very slowly. So if you click on Escuchar you can listen to the word you looked for.

Also a very useful feature of WordReference is that you can have different expressions with the word café americano, café con leche. You know like Americano, or coffee with milk etc.

And in some cases you can also have forums so it shows you forum discussions where users exchange information about different words or different queries to each other. And it shows you all the forum entries where the word café appeared.

Students sometime confuse an online dictionary with a web-based translation tool.

As for the differences between web-based translation tools and dictionaries, the following should be noted.

A dictionary contains all the different possible meanings of a term, while a web-based translation tool chooses only one of these.

The context is a key factor in translation – the linguistic context and the cultural knowledge of both the source and target languages must always be considered.

You might want to use machine translation to check your work but be careful – they do make mistakes!