Dictionary & Definitions

A dictionary answers what a word means; a thesaurus answers what else you could have said. A thesaurus lists words that overlap in meaning without ranking them for tone or formality, which is how substitution produces sentences that are defensible word by word and odd as a whole. The safer method is to take a candidate, then read its definition and an example before committing. Synonyms shown here belong to a particular sense rather than to the word overall, so you are not offered a synonym for a sense you did not want.

Nobody appoints a meaning. Modern dictionaries are descriptive: lexicographers read very large quantities of published and recorded English, observe how a word is actually used, and write entries reporting that. Usage moves first and the entry follows, years later, which is why a word can be in wide circulation long before it is defined anywhere. Dictionaries disagree because they read different material, cover different varieties of English, and divide senses at different points — where one sees two meanings, another sees a single meaning stretched. Read an entry as an account rather than a ruling.

Those slashes hold IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, in which each symbol stands for one sound rather than one letter — necessary for English, whose spelling and pronunciation parted company centuries ago. The vertical mark sits before the stressed syllable, not after, and misplaced stress makes a word sound wrong faster than any vowel. The triangular colon lengthens the vowel it follows. Transcriptions differ because they describe different accents, so one written for received pronunciation will not match a General American recording. To say the word aloud, a recording is more use than symbols.

Neither is wrong; they are two conventions, and consistency inside one document matters more than the choice between them. Pick by audience — British readers, employers and publications expect colour, centre and organise — then hold that choice everywhere, including the places people forget, such as licence as a noun against license as a verb. The differences run past spelling: some words differ outright, and a few share a spelling while differing in meaning, which is where real confusion starts. An -ize ending is not automatically American either, since Oxford spelling uses organize in British English.

Which words you look up is more revealing than it sounds — medical terms, legal terms and unfamiliar slang say something about what is happening in your life. Here the word goes out through a route on this site rather than from your browser, so the outside dictionary service is answering the site and not you, and it is lowercased on the way. Repeats within a day are often answered from a stored copy. The exception is the recording: pressing Play loads that file from the source's own host, an ordinary request from your machine.

English hoards senses. Short, old, common words are pressed into new service century after century and rarely shed the old duties, so verbs like set, run and take end up with dozens of distinct meanings while a long technical term has exactly one. Lexicographers then decide where one sense ends and the next begins, which is a judgement rather than a measurement — a large dictionary may list far more senses than a concise one because it splits more finely. Treat any short entry for such a word as a sample, not a survey.

A word can be entirely real and have no entry. Proper nouns are the largest group: people, places, companies and products belong to an encyclopaedia rather than a dictionary. Recent slang, narrow technical vocabulary, regional words and unsettled borrowings are commonly missing too. So are inflected forms in some sources, where running is filed under run and only the base form carries an entry. Before concluding a word does not exist, try the base form, check the spelling letter by letter, and consider whether you have one word or two that an autocorrect joined.

Not reliably. Because dictionaries are indexed by headword, a phrase like break the ice has no place of its own; it lives as a note inside the entry for one of its words, usually the least predictable. The box here accepts spaces, hyphens and apostrophes alongside letters, so a phrase is not refused outright — there is generally no entry to return, and it comes back as not found. For idioms, search the least common word in the phrase, or use a dedicated idiom dictionary, which indexes phrases rather than their parts.