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Electronic lexicography

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Abstract

This paper offers a brief survey of some important developments in the use of computers in making dictionaries and lexicons. Making a dictionary involves collecting the data, sorting and lemmatizing, editing and printing. Five major types of machine-readable dictionaries have developed from these procedures: Machine Readable Lexicons of individual authors, Machine Readable Dictionaries with codes for linguistic information, Machine Dictionaries with selected information, and Lexical Databases with lexical information abstracted from machine-readable dictionaries. The second edition of the QED is a machine-readable dictionary with codes that may provide the basis for a diachronic lexical database.

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Harry M. Logan, associate professor of English, has written The Dialect of the Middle English Life of St. Katherine (Mouton, 1973), using the computer in a study of medieval dialectology. He has also written articles on computational stylistics and literary analysis in CHum, Language. and Style, College Literature, and on the dictionary in Dictionaries.

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Logan, H.M. Electronic lexicography. Comput Hum 25, 351–361 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00141185

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