| The term 'dictionary' loosely denotes a wide range of reference sources useful to students across all disciplines. It is often felt to apply mainly to works giving linguistic information about words, such as their spelling, pronunciation, grammatical class, meanings, phrasal and collocational combinations, related words, and varietal restrictions. By contrast 'encyclopaedias' contain detailed factual, cultural and other non-linguistic information. However, in practice, many works named dictionaries contain the latter information in considerable quantities - general encyclopaedic dictionaries, and specialist subject area dictionaries such as dictionaries of biography, architecture, civilization, literature, politics and indeed of languages and linguistics. |