According to scientists (linguists and psycholinguists), about a thousand words are enough for the average person "with a head" for everyday life. However, the vocabulary of an educated European is about ten to twenty thousand. We are talking about active use, while we can know and understand about two to two and a half times more words.
But as soon as a person is immersed in any speci alty, branch of knowledge, topic - and at least knitting or sawing - he also needs means of expression specific to this area. And if we are constantly dealing with documents, we simply definitely need a wide variety of types of dictionaries. Linguists and translators have a habit of using such reference literature - after all, this is their speci alty. The most popular types of dictionaries among them are primarily bilingual and multilingual - giving a translation of a word into one or more languages. There are both monolingual and thesauri,and
dictionaries of some specific group. For example, foreign words, etymological (explaining the origin of the lexeme), explanatory. It is even difficult to enumerate all types of Russian language dictionaries. If you need to find out what a particular word or concept means, you should use an explanatory (for example, edited by Ozhegov or Dahl) or an encyclopedic dictionary.
However, not all words can be included in such publications: for example, they may not contain highly specialized terminology. In this case, such types of dictionaries are needed, in which special (medical, technical, mathematical) terms are collected. And the meaning of the idiom - well, at least "put it on the back burner" or "eat the dog" - we will check in the dictionary of phraseological units. Especially often such reference books are needed by translators of fiction and those who simply study a foreign language. After all, if in its native phraseological unit it is clear from the context, then it will not be possible to translate it literally into English or German, retaining the meaning.
There are also so-called "reverse" types of dictionaries - if usually words are arranged in alphabetical order by the first, second and subsequent letters, then for example, a rhyming dictionary represents the endings of words and sorting goes in the opposite direction.
If we mention the dictionaries of the Russian language, the types of which are very diverse, it is necessary to mention both frequency and semantic dictionaries.
In suchIn reference books, words are grouped by frequency of use or by thematic groups: from the core (the most important lexemes in this subject) to the periphery.
There are also such types of dictionaries as spelling - they can be used to check the spelling of a word, orthoepic - with which the sound and pronunciation are checked, dialectical (or regional), where the vocabulary of a certain territorial group (the so-called dialects) is collected and explained. Neologisms, obsolete words - that is, those that have either recently entered the language and have not yet been sufficiently mastered by it, or have not been used for a long time - are presented in the corresponding dictionaries (historicisms, obsolete words, new words). Finally, such types of dictionaries are created that represent the work of a particular writer or poet, with comments explaining the specifics of his use of certain words. These include, for example, "Dictionary of the language of A. S. Pushkin", "Dictionary of Yesenin's works" and others.
