How to Read a Long Dictionary Entry

Dictionary entries come in various sizes, with various levels of detail provided. We'll tackle longer Dictionary entries in this article. For other article types, see:

• For short entries, see: How to Read a Short Dictionary Entry
• For Dictionary pages with multiple entries, see: How to Read Pages with More than One Entry

There are two simple actions to help you find what you are looking for: scrolling and expanding. Let’s see how this can help you locate information on the page in three scenarios: a short entry (one with one single definition), a longer entry (with many definitions), and a very long page (where several entries are found together because two or more different words are spelled and pronounced exactly like each other).

Tour of a Longer Entry

The Headword and the Pronunciation

Like in a short entry, the headword is at the top in bold, followed by the pronunciation in square brackets. You can toggle from the phonetically spelled pronunciation to the pronunciation that uses the International Phonetic Alphabet characters. There is a speaker icon to hear the word pronounced. 

Part of Speech and the Definition

A longer entry may have multiple parts of speech and many definitions for each part of speech. The word ‘film’ for example, has eight primary definitions for how the word is used as a noun. Some of those have subsenses (related senses that share a definition number). 

If you are looking for the most common or most frequent definition in general use, it will probably be one of these first two definitions. The most frequent definitions and those that express core meanings are found at the top of the list.

The first 2 definitions for the part of speech show by default. So if you are looking for a more specialized meaning, or if you just don’t see what you were looking for, you will need to click 'See More' to expand the noun part of speech to see all of the noun meanings. 

Examples

Some definitions are followed by example text in italics. Examples can help you to see how a word is typically used with that meaning. Examples can also be used in the opposite direction. If you know how you’ve seen a word used and you need to know which of several meanings is the one defining that use, it’s sometimes easier to start with the example. Do you mean ‘film’ in the sense of a thin coating or do you mean it like a sheet of something, not necessarily attached to anything else? Well, look at the examples, and decide if the film you are trying to describe is more like grease coating a plate or more like a thin sheet of ice. With those examples in mind, the difference between two similar-sounding definitions may be easier to see.