Introduction

Summary

“The dictionary” – the idiom is so thoroughly established that we could not avoid using it in the title of this book, the Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary, even though the book’s purpose is to undermine the restrictive force of that the. The dictionary identifies a genre, type, or medium, like the novel, the symphony, or the movies, but there is a difference: we say, when someone has a question about a word, “Look it up in the dictionary!” yet no one with a question about moral character says, “Look it up in the novel!” or, about orchestration, “Look it up in the symphony!” In fact, there are many types of dictionary, many different dictionary examples of each type, and for practical purposes an inexhaustible number of dictionaries to consult on almost any question about any word. “The dictionary” is reductive. This handbook is correspondingly and correctively expansive in its understanding of dictionaries.