Sharp PW-E560 Manuel De Fonctionnement page 41

y, i.e. it Programme (see below). By using concordancing techniques, each word can be
es are viewed almost instantaneously in the immediate contexts in which it is used.
n adopted Whereas compilers of previous dictionaries were able to base their work on only a
ere were limited selection of citations, lexicographers on the Oxford Dictionary of English
analysed hundreds of real examples of each word to see how real language
behaves today.
Concordances show at a glance that some combinations of words (called
entence or
'collocations') occur together much more often than others. For example,
r's or writer's
concordance entries might show that 'end in', 'end the', and 'end up' all occur quite
ing was done.
often. But are any of these combinations important enough to be given special
oint of view,
treatment in the dictionary?
ference, e.g.
Recent research has focused on identifying combinations that are not merely
frequent but also statistically significant. In the Oxford English Corpus, the two
adjective or
words 'end the' occur very frequently together but they do not form a statistically
significant unit, since the word 'the' is the commonest 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
based on
behaves in normal use. Of course, a dictionary for general use cannot go into
every
detailed statistical analysis of word combinations, but it can present examples that
thousands of
are typical of normal usage. In the Oxford Dictionary of English particularly
age, about
significant or important patterns are highlighted, in bold, e.g. end in, end up under
out register
end.
er archaic or
For further details, see the section on Grammar.
dicine,
2. Oxford Reading Programme
The citation database created by the Oxford Reading Programme is an ongoing
research project in which readers around the world select citations from a huge
sh Corpus,
variety of specialist and non-specialist sources in all varieties of English. This
this source.
database currently stands at around 77 million words and is growing at a rate of 7
s holdings of
million words a year.
n and spoken
s. Among
n words), a
ing
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