Loading page
Eight guides to the machinery a dictionary normally leaves implicit: where a syllable breaks and how to find the stressed one, how to read a pronunciation without learning IPA, what a part of speech actually tests for, why a thesaurus that pools senses hands you the wrong word, and why 1,677 words carry most of the language while 99,506 sit in the rarest band. Each one is written against the 147,478 entries in this corpus rather than about English in general.
A word page can show you that photographer is stressed on its second syllable. It cannot tell you why the stress moved there from photograph, or how to find the stress in a word you have never said aloud. These guides are the part that does not fit on an entry.
They follow one rule strictly, and it is the reason they can be trusted on numbers:
Each stands alone and links onward to the two or three it follows from. Start anywhere; syllables and stress is the one the others lean on most.
What a syllable is made of, where the breaks fall and why, and four tests that locate the stressed syllable in a word you have never said aloud.
Every entry prints a pronunciation twice — once in IPA and once in plain letters. This is what each respelling symbol means, why ahy and uu look strange, and what the scheme deliberately throws away.
Noun, verb, adjective, adverb — defined by where they fit in a sentence rather than by what they mean, which is the only definition that survives contact with real words.
A synonym belongs to a meaning, not to a word. Pooling every synonym of every sense into one list is how a thesaurus hands you a word that is technically correct and obviously wrong.
825 entries carry ten senses or more; the corpus average is 1.4. The words at the top are short, old and ones you use daily — and that is not a coincidence.
Every noun sense sits inside a hierarchy of categories. Reading it upward tells you what a word is; reading it downward tells you what your options are. Three real chains from the corpus, and the trap that derails them.
Four spelling patterns account for most of the visible difference, the vocabulary differences are fewer than people think, and register is where the real gap sits. What this corpus can and cannot tell you about any of it.
Word lists produce recognition, not use. What works instead is learning words in structures — opposites, categories, senses and sounds — and a dictionary of 147,478 entries is mostly not the material.