An idiom dictionary is a dictionary or

phrase book A phrase book or phrasebook is a collection of ready-made phrases, usually for a foreign language along with a translation, indexed and often in the form of questions and answers. Structure While mostly thematically structured into several ...

that lists and explains idioms – distinctive words or phrases having a figurative meaning that goes beyond the original

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comp ...

of the words.

Idioms

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning could not be readily deduced from the meaning of its individual words. The word comes from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

''ἰδίωμα'' (idioma) – the distinctive style of a particular person. The traditional example is "

kick the bucket To kick the bucket is an English idiom considered a euphemistic, informal, or slang term meaning "to die". Its origin remains unclear, though there have been several theories. Origin theories A common theory is that the idiom refers to hanging, ei ...

" which is normally understood to mean dying. The extent to which a phrase is thought idiomatic is a matter of degree and native speakers of English consider a phrase like "pop the question" (proposing marriage) to be less idiomatic than "kick the bucket".

Dictionary

An idiom dictionary may be a traditional book or expressed in another medium such as a database within software for

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

. Examples of the genre include ''

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable ''Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable'', sometimes referred to simply as ''Brewer's'', is a reference work containing definitions and explanations of many famous phrases, allusions, and figures, whether historical or mythical. The "New E ...

'', which explains traditional allusions and proverbs, and '' Fowler's Modern English Usage'', which was conceived as an idiom dictionary following the completion of the '' Concise Oxford English Dictionary'', which itself contained many idioms. Some multilingual dictionaries of idioms are available on-line. One of them i
Babelite
which is freely accessible. The main readership and market for idiom dictionaries are

deaf Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...

people and learners of

English as a foreign language English as a second or foreign language is the use of English by speakers with different native languages. Language education for people learning English may be known as English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL ...

(EFL). The first major dictionary of idioms in

American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances i ...

was ''A Dictionary of Idioms for the Deaf''; published in 1966 by the

American School for the Deaf The American School for the Deaf (ASD), originally ''The American Asylum, At Hartford, For The Education And Instruction Of The Deaf'', is the oldest permanent school for the deaf in the United States, and the first school for children with dis ...

. Subsequent editions were published under the more general title of ''A Dictionary of American Idioms''.

Structure

Idioms may vary considerably in their presentation. The keywords may vary – "green fingers" or a "green thumb". The grammar may vary – "turn the tables" or "the tables are turned". A phrase may even be recast completely, just following a pattern – "a few gallons shy of a full tank" or "one sandwich short of a picnic". This variation makes organisation of an idiom dictionary difficult. The idioms may be organised in simple alphabetical order, as in ''The Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English''. They may be grouped by keyword, as in the ''Longman Dictionary of English Idioms''. Or they may be grouped by domain so that, for example, all idioms based upon nautical expressions such as "show him the ropes" and "three sheets to the wind" are put together.

Bilingual dictionaries

Bilingual dictionaries have an additional problem when dealing with idioms – as well as explaining the idiom, they also have to translate it. In doing so, they will commonly provide both a

literal translation Literal translation, direct translation or word-for-word translation, is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately, without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In translation theory, anoth ...

and a

free translation Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a ''lacuna'', or lexical gap. The term arises when desc ...

. For example, the phrase "can be counted on the fingers of one hand", meaning few in number, may translated literally into Chinese as ''qu zhe ke shu'' and, more sensibly, as ''liao liao wu ji'' (only a handful).

Notes

References