Describe how dictionaries changed - 사전의 발전

    We’ll imagine that you are from China. You’ve never been outside your country before and you just barely started learning British English. One day, someone tells you, “Turn off the faucet!”  You’d have no idea what they were talking about, right? That’s only ONE of the possibilities that you wouldn’t understand each other. That’s why you need a dictionary. And that’s probably also why dictionaries were made. 

The first English dictionary was written by Robert Cawdrey in  1604. 

 

And many dictionaries were made after. After their authors' deaths, though, they were very quickly outdated. One dictionary, made in 1828, by Noah Webster, had a different fate. Noah Webster was also an author and lawyer. He thought that the U.S needed a separate kind of English. That’s because America had just gone into being independent from Britain. In his dictionary, Webster included slang words. He captured how the people in the U.S used language in daily life. 

     

 

    But, these dictionaries sometimes included unnecessary things. For example, Noah Webster included in his dictionary that women are ‘mild, pitiful, soft, and flexible.’ Not all women are all of those things. But, as dictionaries improved and time went on, those things were deleted from the dictionary. 

 

Nowadays, dictionaries are still very useful. They might not include the same definitions as the first English dictionary, but they are still for the same reason. Also, these days, the dictionaries have improved and have more words in them. The include some slang words, and the Webster’s dictionary has evolved into the Merriam - Webster’s dictionary. There is a pocket version, with 160 - 200 new words in it. 

Today, we use dictionaries all the time - but we don’t carry them around - we slip them in our hand-bags, purses and pockets. They’re everywhere - on our phones, iPads, tablets, PCs, monitors, MacBooks, and much more! It’s like we have all the words that we need - at our fingertips. In my second favorite book, “Out of my mind,” Melody once said, “It’s like I have the whole world. At my fingertips,”