Reviewed by: Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary by Susan Rennie Dominic Cheetham (bio) Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary, by Susan Rennie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 287. $24.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-19-273645-1; $15.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-19-273648-2. The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary (ORDD) is a curious blend of children’s picture dictionary, specialist dictionary, play book, and visually arresting piece of Roald Dahl fan-base merchandising. My first reaction on seeing the book was to think that such a blend of aims must be very difficult to pull off effectively and I was prepared to be disappointed. Happily, I wasn’t. Corpus-based dictionaries are now the norm, but the ORDD is an interesting twist on that norm. As an Oxford dictionary, it has the advantages of the usage and frequency data yielded by the Oxford Children’s Corpus, but because it is a specialist dictionary, it is primarily based on the language used in Roald Dahl’s children’s books, what we might call a “Roald Dahl Children’s Corpus.” Conceptually, the dictionary is fueled by the large number of words which Dahl coined for his children’s books, though the majority of the entries are normal English words which are found in, or are relevant to, those books (such as that for aardvark, see below). The definitions are no doubt informed by the Oxford Children’s Corpus data, and sometimes they differ little from what you might expect in any children’s dictionary: ledge noun ledges a narrow shelf that sticks out from a wall or under a window, sometimes useful for sitting on (137) But the definitions often explicitly refer to the content of Dahl’s writing: lawn noun lawns A lawn is a piece of ground in a garden covered with short grass. Mrs Twit’s garden doesn’t have a lawn: just nettles and thistles (136) Where the dictionary entries are of words used in Dahl’s writing for children, examples of usage are taken from that corpus: “The Queen crossed over to the window and stood beside Sophie. ‘Come down off that ledge,’ she said. the bfg” (137) [End Page 180] This is where the dictionary gets interesting in terms of audience attention and in terms of learning. Using examples from Dahl’s stories produces the same kinds of psychological effect as we can expect from intertextual connections in a novel: recognizing an intertextual connection can be a source of great satisfaction for a reader. In the case of this dictionary the connections are made perfectly explicit, stating which of Dahl’s books each example is taken from, but this does not reduce the pleasure that can be felt from recognizing an example and remembering that scene in the source text. For readers particularly familiar with Dahl’s work, simply reading the headword can be enough to trigger a memory, especially if it is one of Dahl’s made-up words. This might seem a trivial thing to mention, but it is a choice which in my experience is uncommon. Most corpus-derived examples are taken from very large and varied collections, and the sources of the examples are not usually cited in dictionaries. This contrasts with the deliberately limited and specific corpus used here. An adult equivalent might, for example, be a dictionary of Shakespeare, but the closest example that I can find is David and Ben Crystal’s Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary, which has notably similar aims and layout and similarly offers short quotations from Shakespeare as usage examples: adamant noun legendary substance of great hardness, believed to have magnetic force •(MND 2.1.195) Helena tells Demetrius she can’t stop following him: ‘You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant!’ (13) The definitions in the ORDD follow the style popularized by the COBUILD project, often repeating the headword and defining the word in accessible everyday English (Moon 2007), a style independently confirmed by McKeown (1993) to be considerably more effective for learning than traditional definition styles. The definitions also have a refreshing touch of humor (also, incidentally, a valuable aid to learning), as in the opening entry: aardvark noun aardvarks An aardvark is an...
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Aug 1, 2023
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