2.4 Using several dictionaries to find more information about a word
If you wish to find additional information about a word, you can look it up in more than one dictionary. You will practise this in the following activity.
Activity 5
Go back to the OneLook [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] page and look up the word strategy in the Collins Dictionary, and in Vocabulary.com. What additional information can you find?
Answer
The Collins English Dictionary gives more synonyms and links to translations of the word in several languages. Vocabulary.com gives more examples showing how ‘strategy’ can be used in a sentence. It also provides other words that are part of the same ‘word family’. These are all the words that have a similar form and meaning. The word family of strategy includes: strategic, strategies, strategically, strategist, and strategists.
These words allow you to express an idea in a different way, perhaps when paraphrasing. For example, the phrase ‘adopt a strategy to deal with a problem’ can be turned to ‘deal with a problem strategically’. A list of all the academic word families is provided by the Academic Word List (AWL) provided by the website UEFAP.