Words as meaningful building-blocks of language
We think of words as the basic units of language. When a baby begins to
speak,It is clear also that words on their own, outside sentences, can be sorted
and classified in various ways. A comprehensive classification of English
words according to meaning is a thesaurus, such as Roget’s Thesaurus. But
the kind of conventional classification that we are likely to refer to most
often is a dictionary, in which words are listed according to their spelling
in alphabetical order.
Given that English spelling is so erratic, a common reason for looking
up a word in an English dictionary is to check how to spell it. But another
very common reason is to check what it means. In fact, that is what a
dictionary entry basically consists of: an association of a word, alphabetically
listed, with a definition of what it means, and perhaps also some