Children's Dictionaries: An Introduction

ABSTRACT:This is an introduction to a special issue of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America on the topic of children's dictionaries. It offers a brief overview of the nature of children's dictionaries and introduces the range of articles in the issue. These include professional memoirs of those involved in children's dictionary creation and publishing in North America and the UK and academic articles on nineteenth-century English children's dictionaries, the development of the Oxford Children's Language Corpus, gender stereotypes in Greek children's dictionaries, and Welsh language dictionaries for children. The introduction also describes two reports which feature in the issue: an account of a dictionary creation project in a Catalan school, and a preview of the forthcoming School edition of the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage.