Australian National Dictionary Centre
Research School of Humanities
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Australian National Dictionary Centre
Research School of Humanities
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Schools Dictionary ProjectHow to Make Your Own DictionaryA Teacher's Guide
6. HAVE YOU DISCOVERED A NEW WORD? The Australian National Dictionary Centre researches all aspects of Australian English, publishes dictionaries of Australian terms, and edits Oxford dictionaries with a special emphasis on Australian usage and content. The Centre is keen to encourage an interest in English as it is written and spoken in Australia, and to facilitate a better understanding of how a dictionary works. We offer How to Make Your Own Dictionary to students and teachers with these two objectives in mind. We hope that it provides a new way of learning about the language we Australians speak, and at the same time allows students to discover that a dictionary is much more than a useful spelling tool.
1.1 What is the project about? One of the best ways for students to understand how dictionaries work is to make one themselves. This project is designed to get students to create a dictionary on a subject of their choice, collecting words that are unique to that subject. In doing so they will conduct their own original research. Students will:
The project can be done by individuals, by groups within a class, or by the class as a whole. 1.2 Who is the project suitable for? How to Make Your Own Dictionary can be tailored to suit the age and ability of students from the upper primary years to year twelve. For younger students (years five to eight) an appropriate project may be the compiling of a simple word list arising from class discussion, with each entry in the list consisting of a headword and a definition arrived at by consensus. Entries in a word list (on the subject of surfing, for example) might look like this:
It is an easy step from this to add an illustrative quotation to show how the word is used:
For older students (years nine to twelve) who have greater research skills and the ability to work independently, a more complex project is possible. The simple word list described above can be expanded to include information about the word's history (i.e. etymology), its pronunciation and part of speech. Again, an illustrative quotation for each word (whether invented by the student or collected in the course of research) helps to show how the word is used, and adds greatly to the interest and readability of the entry. Dictionary entries might look something like this:
Careful choice of the amount and type of information included in the dictionary will determine the scope of the project.
In researching this project students will
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Before getting students to choose the subject of their dictionary, you may wish to look at Discussion Topics (section 9) for some ideas to help initiate a general discussion about language use. Students are more likely to be motivated in their research efforts if the subject they choose is of special interest to them. Class discussion should quickly reveal a range of activities and interests that could provide material for a specialist dictionary. A student who belongs to a recreational or sporting club, for instance, will use special words associated with those activities that other students may not be familiar with. Asking a student to describe the particular activity or sport in some detail will reveal a part of this vocabulary. For example:
The following list gives some idea of the many possible subject areas:
Once students have chosen the subject of their dictionary, they will need to decide how and where they are going to find words for it. The ways in which words may be collected for the dictionary will vary according to the subject matter. Some subjects will be well documented in print; some will be more easily researched in films, video and television. Others will be difficult to find anywhere except in the speech of its users - playground or gang language will fall into this category - and in this case students will need to conduct interviews with the people involved. Here are some of the places to start:
Most subjects will lend themselves to a variety of methods. For surfing, for example, there will be books in the school and local libraries (including autobiographies of Australian surfers), there are numerous surfing magazines, there are films and videos, and of course students can conduct interviews with people involved in surfing. There may be a local surf club bulletin or surfing reports in the newspaper or on television. For a local industry, there may be information in the local newspapers, in the industry's newsletters, and in books on the history of the district, but it is more than likely that the primary source for words will be interviews. Many local history societies now have excellent libraries and archives. For example, some of these libraries have early copies of local newspapers: students could do a study of unusual words which appear in such a newspaper in a particular year. Such libraries often have detailed records of industries in the area, and this could be a good source of local words for a particular industry. They often have books and pamphlets on the flora and fauna of the area, and this could be a good place to start in a study of words for your local flora and fauna. In the mid 1980s a book called The Lifeblood of Footscray: Working Lives at the Angliss Meatworks was published by Melbourne's Living Museum of the West. It includes the personal histories of many people who had worked at the meatworks. The following is an extract from an interview reported in the book:
Elsewhere in this interview the speaker refers to solo slaughtering, which was the system whereby one man would deal with the complete carcass. In the 1930s a chain system was introduced whereby the carcass moved along an overhead conveyor or chain, and each man was required to perform only one specialised task. In the past it had taken a three year apprenticeship to become a solo slaughterman; now it took only six weeks to become a one-cut slaught. The changes led to great industrial disputes. This short passage has a number of terms which should appear in a dictionary dealing with life at the Angliss Meatworks in the 1930s and 1940s: box factory You will not find most of these words in a dictionary, yet they were obviously part of Australia's language history. If you choose to study a local industry you will soon discover that this industry has a language of its own. The language will tell you much about the workplace as a social institution.
Write it down with the sentence in which it appears. (This can be done manually or electronically - see section 3.4 Storing words.) Capturing the word in the context of a sentence will help students arrive at the meaning of the word when they come to define it later. If the student has chosen to use illustrative quotations from their research in the dictionary, they will need to record brief details of where the quotation was found. For instance, if the word is found in a book, the details to note are the year of publication, the author's name, the title and page number. The quotation with attached details will look something like this:
If the word is found in a magazine:
In a newspaper:
In a television or radio program:
In a personal interview:
Dictionary makers (or lexicographers) have traditionally used index cards to record information and this is still a convenient way to do it. Each card records a single headword, its context, and information about its source. Completed cards can be kept in alphabetical order by headword for easy reference. A card storing information about the word clubbie above will look like this:
A computer can also be useful in collecting and storing this information. If students have access to a PC with Microsoft Windows, they could consider using the program Cardfile (usually in the Accessories Group) to store words, using the index card format shown above. Back to Contents
Once students decide they have gathered enough information for their dictionary, the process of editing the raw material begins. Depending on which information the students wish to include, they will need to:
In the course of research students will inevitably collect more headwords than will finally appear in their dictionary. At the start of the project they will be getting a feel for their topic, and to begin with they will probably collect words that seem potentially important, but which may not appear to be central when their grasp of the language of the chosen topic develops. When students have finished collecting words they will be in a better position to select headwords, which should then be arranged in alphabetical order.
It will be useful to give students some practice at writing definitions before they begin to define their own headwords. As an exercise you might ask each member of the class to write a definition for each of the following: fish grey bogan seven wuss kangaroo mainland Discuss the students' definitions, and reach an agreement on the best way to define each word. Compare them with the definitions in a dictionary. Which do the class prefer? When defining their own headwords students will first need to find out if they have already been recorded in a dictionary. If so they should consult their own material, particularly if they have gathered the word in context, to decide if the existing definition fits their own sense of the word as they have recorded it. Students may decide to modify or rewrite the given definition in accordance with their own findings.
Providing a part of speech for each headword is a good way of showing a class that it is useful to have a basic knowledge of a system of grammar, whether traditional or functional grammar is taught to the students. As with writing definitions, some practice will be probably be necessary before the students work on their own headwords. The illustrative quotations they have gathered with their words will be helpful in determining how the word functions in the sentence.
You will find the following set of symbols useful in writing pronunciations for headwords:
When students begin looking for the origin of a headword, their task will be easier if the word already exists in a dictionary. If it does not, which is likely with much informal unwritten language (of the playground, clubs, gangs and so on), students may be able to make an educated guess about the origin of a word. Some may well be obvious; for instance, the origin of the word 'wettie' meaning 'wetsuit' needs no research to tell us that it is a shortened form of 'wetsuit', with the '-ie' (sometimes spelt '-y') ending that is a familiar feature of Australian English. Sometimes, when dictionaries offer no help and educated guesses seem unlikely, students will have to record 'origin unknown' as their etymology.
As mentioned earlier, providing illustrative quotations with each entry adds much to the interest and readability of the dictionary. Sentences which students have gathered in the course of their research, whether from reading or from interviews, will be the most interesting kind of quotation since they are real examples of language at work. However, it may not always be possible to gather actual examples of words in context, and some subjects may not lend themselves to this. Some students may prefer to make up their own illustrative quotations. Back to Contents
Have students check each other's work as part of the editing process, to make sure that the information included in each entry is clear to other readers. 6. HAVE YOU DISCOVERED A NEW WORD? Let us know. We are always keen to add new words and usages to our database for possible publication in future dictionaries. If we use your information you will be acknowledged in the next edition of The Australian National Dictionary. If you have any questions, or would like some advice on your chosen topic, get in touch with the Australian National Dictionary Centre by fax, email, or snail mail.
The following are some ideas for initiating class discussion about language use. Obviously, the age of the students will determine which exercises are suitable:
bunyip boomerang jarrah humpy If their dictionary does not provide the answers, click on each of the words above for more information. The page layout of Words from the West: A Glossary of Western Australian Terms (see Publications) is a possible model for your dictionary. In the course of your research you will need to consult a number of dictionaries. We recommend the dictionaries produced by the Australian National Dictionary Centre. Senior students will find the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) a useful tool. The Australian National Dictionary shows you what a historical dictionary looks like, and is the first point of reference for Australian words. Back to Contents |
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