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(understanding), text production, text revision, and translation. The
knowledge-oriented functions deal with situations where the
dictionary is used for acquiring specific knowledge about a
particular matter, and for acquiring general knowledge about
something. The optimal dictionary is one that contains information
directly relevant for the needs of the users relating to one or more
of these functions. It is important that the information is presented
in a way that keeps the lexicographic information costs at a
minimum.
All dictionaries are divided into linguistic and encyclopedic.
Encyclopedic dictionaries describe different objects,
phenomena and people and give some information about them.
Linguistic dictionaries describe vocabulary units, their
semantic structure, their origin and their usage; words are usually
given in the alphabetical order.
Linguistic dictionaries are divided into general and
specialized dictionaries.
General dictionaries include explanatory (monolingual) and
translation (bilingual) dictionaries.
In explanatory (monolingual) dictionaries the entry consists
of the spelling, transcription, grammatical forms, meanings,
examples, phraseology.
Translation (bilingual) dictionaries give words and their
equivalents in the other language.
Specialized dictionaries include dictionaries of synonyms,
antonyms, collocations, word frequency, slang, neologisms;
etymological, pronouncing, phraseological and other dictionaries.
Specialized dictionaries (also technical dictionaries) focus on
linguistic and factual matters relating to specific subject fields. A
specialized dictionary may have a relatively broad coverage, e.g. a
picture dictionary, in that it covers several subject fields such as
science and technology (a multi-field dictionary), or their coverage
may be more narrow, in that they cover one particular subject field
such as law (a single-field dictionary) or even a specific sub-field

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