Words similar to headwords
Example sentences for: headwords
How can you use “headwords” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:
The boldface headwords, alas in sansserif type (making it difficult to read words like Pilling, pillion, pilliwinkle, Illinois , etc., because the lower-case i resembles lower-case l , which is hard to distinguish from capital I ), are followed by pronunciations printed in blue, with variants in black, an expensive but worthwhile idea that works if you are not reading in a dim light.
To give you a sample of what's to come, let me mention a few representative headwords from Volume IV—chosen simply because I like them.
The simple facts are that American college (or desk) dictionaries today contain about 170,000 entries (about half that number of headwords), up from the ±130,000 they had till the 1960s); British concise dictionaries contain far fewer than that: the Concise Oxford , the best-selling dictionary in the UK, contains about 120,000 entries (probably not more than about 60,000 headwords), which is equivalent to what are classed as concise dictionaries in America.
The general production of the book is poor: the paper has too much “see-through,” causing the type on the back of a page to interfere with the legibility; the type is too gray; the definitions are run into one another, with semicolons in place of definition numbers, making it difficult to distinguish senses and requiring one to read through a long entry before coming to the sense sought; it is almost impossible to discover where a new part of speech begins; subentries of idiomatic phrases and phrasal verbs are given the same prominence as headwords, making them easy to find but detracting from the headword treatment; and the substandard typography has created many loose lines which poor proofreading has failed to catch.
Thus, a dictionary with approximately 80,000 headwords, the size of American college dictionaries, contains more than 170,000 entries.
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