Conceptual dictionary
A conceptual dictionary (also ideographic or ideological dictionary) is a
alphabetical order. Examples of conceptual dictionaries are picture dictionaries, thesauri, and visual dictionaries. Onelook.com and Diccionario Ideológico de la Lengua Española (for Spanish)[1]
are specific online and print examples.
This is sometimes called a reverse dictionary because it organized by concepts, phrases, or the
headwords. This is similar to a thesaurus, where one can look up a concept by some common, general word, and then find a list of near-synonyms of that word. (For example, in a thesaurus one could look up "doctor" and be presented with such words as healer, physician, surgeon, M.D., medical man, medicine man, academic, professor, scholar, sage, master, expert.) In theory, a reverse dictionary might go further than this, allowing you to find a word by its definition only (for example, to find the word "doctor" knowing only that he is a "person who cures disease"). Such dictionaries have become more practical with the advent of computerized
information-storage and retrieval systems (i.e. computer databases).
An example of this type of reverse dictionary is the Diccionario Ideológico de la Lengua Española (Spanish Language Ideological Dictionary).[1] This allows the user to find words based on a small set of general concepts.
Examples
(English)
- Bernstein, Theodore, Bernstein's Reverse Dictionary, Crown, New York, 1975.
- Edmonds, David (ed.), The Oxford Reverse Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.
- Kahn, John, Reader's Digest Reverse Dictionary, Reader's Digest, London, 1989.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20180125074625/https://tradisho.com/ Concept based dictionary for the 170+ languages in the Philippines
- Onelook Reverse Dictionary
- ReverseDictionary.org
References
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