The Various Categorizations of Dictionaries
A dictionary is a book or tool designed to present meaning of terminologies of in a specific language, field or any are of study. Sometime it is given the term lexicon when it is used to compare or describe words of two or more different languages.
Dictionaries are mainly of two categories; specialized and general dictionaries. The main and majorly sole difference between the two categories of dictionaries is that specialized ones do not contain information on words used in the more general language rather, has words and terminologies and meanings of a certain area of specialization. They mainly focus on a specific field of study.
A specialized dictionary can further be classified into three other categories. These are; multi-field dictionaries which mainly cover the whole broad field of study for example a science dictionary. From the broad science dictionary, focus can be narrowed down to may be biological dictionary. This will be called a single field dictionary. Again from the biological dictionary, we can narrow our focus to let us say botanical dictionary. This now is a subfield dictionary. A dictionary in general is intended for grasp of meanings of words and terminologies.
