There is more agreement among descriptive dictionaries than among prescriptive dictionaries…. For example, a descriptive dictionary might define desert as a place with little water, such as the Sahara, while a prescriptive dictionary might define it as a place that averages less than 10 inches of rain a year, which would make the Arctic and Antarctic deserts, because neither gets that much rain, although both of them have a great deal of water, which happens to be frozen.
A descriptive dictionary is one that attempts to describe how a word is used, while a prescriptive dictionary is one that prescribes how a word should be used. In addition, all dictionaries may be classified as descriptive or prescriptive, and some seek to be both types. A purely prescriptive dictionary would disregard usage of the living language and instead rely on ideas of "correctness" set forth in "rules" that the prescriptivist imagines should be imposed upon the language. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, is an approach that attempts to prescribe (some might say recommend or even dictate) how words ought to be used.
At Merriam-Webster, we embrace the descriptive approach-that is, we write definitions that describe or, if you will, reflect how words are actually used by writers and speakers of the English language. Readers of our online content might occasionally encounter the juxtaposition of two basic schools of thought in lexicography: descriptivism and prescriptivism.
0 kommentar(er)
