The Number of Entry Words and Examples in Korean Dictionaries

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to discuss the actual condition of headwords in Korean dictionaries containing large-scale headwords based on quantitative analysis of headwords and examples. To this end, the size and composition of the headwords of other Korean dictionaries and the Yonsei Modern Korean Dictionary, which are being compiled by the Yonsei University Language Information Research Institute, were compared and analyzed. The Korean Dictionary (1999) and Korea University's Korean Dictionary (2011), which were analyzed in this study, contain 500,000 headwords and 400,000 headwords, respectively. Among them, the modern standard general language is about 200,000, and other headwords are specialized words, It consists of North Korean, dialect, old language, and non-standard languages. In addition, the headwords that presented examples in the two dictionaries are about 110,000 to 120,000 headwords, which is similar to the size of headwords that show examples among the headlines in the Yonsei Modern Korean Dictionary (unpublished, 2014). The number of meaning solutions that presented an example also shows a similar scale of the three dictionaries. Therefore, the number of Korean headwords whose usage is confirmed in dictionaries with large headword scales can be said to be 120,000 headwords. Depending on whether you aim for a usage-oriented dictionary based on corpus analysis or a vocabulary list dictionary, the size of the dictionary's headword selection will vary, which will be an important criterion for establishing the direction for new dictionary compilation, such as the subsequent dictionary of the Yonsei Korean Dictionary.