Using an English-English dictionary or a thesaurus

Many students who learn English in their home country before coming to the United States use bilingual dictionaries, which list words in English with native-language translations or vice versa. By now, you have probably noticed that some words in these dictionaries do not have appropriate translations for academic work. While the dictionaries can help you understand as you read and may help beginning writers, they are not always the best resource for college writing.

Since you are now a college-level writer, consider investing in an English-English dictionary that is designed for multilingual writers. These dictionaries typically provide not only definitions but also sample sentences for each word. Many of these dictionaries also provide information that is not readily available in dictionaries for native speakers. For example, they usually note whether a noun is count, noncount, or both, and they often provide information about the word’s level of formality.

The following are some dictionaries and thesauri (books that provide lists of synonyms, words with similar meanings) designed for multilingual writers.

Dictionaries

Thesauri

Related topics:

Intensive and extensive language activities

Reading while listening

Becoming familiar with the Academic Word List

Learning prefixes and suffixes

Keeping a vocabulary notebook

Keeping an editing log

Targeting areas for improvement