[postpositive]: used to mark an adjective which is used postpositively, i.e. it typically comes immediately after the noun which it modifies. Such uses are unusual in English and generally arise because the adjective has been adopted from a language where postpositive use is standard, e.g. galore in there were prizes galore for everything.
Terms relating to adverbs
[sentence adverb]: used to mark an adverb which stands outside a sentence or clause, providing commentary on it as a whole or showing the speaker’s or writer’s attitude to what is being said, rather than the manner in which something was done. Sentence adverbs most frequently express the speaker's or writer's point of view, although they may also be used to set a context by stating a field of reference, e.g. certainly.
[as submodifier]: used to mark an adverb which is used to modify an adjective or another adverb, e.g. comparatively.
Evidence and Illustrative Examples
The information presented in the dictionary about individual words is based on close analysis of how words behave in real, natural language. Behind every dictionary entry are examples of the word in
1. Oxford English Corpus
The Oxford Dictionary of English was compiled using the Oxford English Corpus, and new material added to this second edition has been derived from this source. The Oxford English Corpus is the name for the Oxford University Press holdings of language databases amounting to hundreds of million words of written and spoken English in
Programme (see below). By using concordancing techniques, each word can be viewed almost instantaneously in the immediate contexts in which it is used. Whereas compilers of previous dictionaries were able to base their work on only a limited selection of citations, lexicographers on the Oxford Dictionary of English analysed hundreds of real examples of each word to see how real language behaves today.
Concordances show at a glance that some combinations of words (called ‘collocations’) occur together much more often than others. For example, concordance entries might show that ‘end in’, ‘end the’, and ‘end up’ all occur quite often. But are any of these combinations important enough to be given special treatment in the dictionary?
Recent research has focused on identifying combinations that are not merely frequent but also statistically significant. In the Oxford English Corpus, the two words ‘end the’ occur very frequently together but they do not form a statistically significant unit, since the word ‘the’ is the commonest in the language. The combinations end up and end in, on the other hand, are shown to be more significant and tell the lexicographer something about the way the verb end behaves in normal use. Of course, a dictionary for general use cannot go into detailed statistical analysis of word combinations, but it can present examples that are typical of normal usage. In the Oxford Dictionary of English particularly significant or important patterns are highlighted, in bold, e.g. end in, end up under end.
For further details, see the section on Grammar.
2. Oxford Reading Programme
The citation database created by the Oxford Reading Programme is an ongoing research project in which readers around the world select citations from a huge variety of specialist and
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