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mark those cases in which predicative use would be less usual.
[predic.]: used to mark an adjective that is normally used predicatively, i.e., comes
after the verb, e.g., ajar in
the door was ajar
(not
the ajar door
).
[postpositive]: used to mark an adjective that is used postpositively, i.e., typically
comes immediately after the noun that it modifies (such uses are unusual in
English and generally arise because the adjective has been adopted from a
language where postpositive use is standard), e.g., galore in
there were prizes
galore
.
Terms relating to adverbs
[sentence adverb]: used to mark an adverb that stands outside a sentence or
clause, providing commentary on it as a whole or showing the speaker’s or writer’s
attitude to what is being said, rather than the manner in which something was done.
Sentence adverbs most frequently express the speaker’s or writer’s point of view,
although they may also be used to set a context by stating a field of reference, e.g.,
certainly.
[as submodifier]: used to mark an adverb that is used to modify an adjective or
another adverb, e.g., comparatively.
Evidence and Illustrative Examples
The information presented in the dictionary about individual words is based on
close analysis of how words behave in real, natural language. Behind every
dictionary entry are examples of the word in use—often hundreds and thousands of
them—that have been analyzed to give information about typical usage, about
distribution (whether typically American or typically British, for example), about
register (whether informal or derogatory, for example), about currency (whether
archaic or dated, for example), and about subject field (whether used only in
medicine or finance, for example).
Databank and Citation Evidence
Extensive use has been made of Oxford’s text databank resources, which include a
carefully balanced selection of 100 million words of written and spoken English text
(equivalent to one person’s reading over ten years) in machine-readable form,
available for computational analysis, and about 64 million words of citations from
Oxford’s own North American Reading Program, an ongoing research project in
which readers select citations from a huge variety of specialist and nonspecialist
sources in all varieties of English. These resources mean that Oxford lexicogra-
phers are in a position to see how words normally behave. By using concordancing
techniques, each word can be viewed almost instantaneously in the immediate
contexts in which it is used. Since the Oxford Reading Program is ongoing, and
growing at a rate of 4.5 million words a year, Oxford lexicographers have the most
up-to-date language resource of an American dictionary, with the majority of the
citations coming from sources of the past two decades.
The Oxford databank shows at a glance that some combinations of words (called
“collocations”) occur together much more often than others. For example,
concordance entries might show that “end in,” “end the,” and “end up” all occur quite
often. But are any of these combinations important enough to be given special
treatment in the dictionary?
Recent research has focused on identifying combinations that are not merely
frequent but also statistically significant. In the Oxford databank, the two words “end
the” occur frequently together but they do not form a statistically significant unit,
since the word “the” is the most common in the language. The combinations end up
and end in, on the other hand, are shown to be more significant and tell the
lexicographer something about the way the verb end behaves in normal use. Of
course, a dictionary for general use cannot go into detailed statistical analysis of
word combinations, but it can present examples that are typical of normal usage. In
the
New Oxford American Dictionary
particularly significant or important patterns
are highlighted, in bold, e.g., end in, end up under end.
For further details, see the previous section on Grammar.
Specialist Reading
A general dictionary databank does not, by definition, contain large quantities of
specialized terminology. For this reason, additional research and collection of
citations in a number of neglected fields (for example, antique collecting, food and
cooking, boats and sailing, photography, video and audio, martial arts, and
alternative medicine) was done to ensure the thorough coverage of these fields.
Additionally, specialists in nearly 100 different areas reviewed entries for accuracy.
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