superdictionary

English

Etymology

From super- (“above, over”) +‎ dictionary.

Noun

superdictionary (plural superdictionaries)

1. (lexicography) An exceptionally comprehensive dictionary, which includes all other dictionaries.
   • 1998, Harriet Murav, Russia's Legal Fictions, Ann Arbor, M.I.: University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 104:

     The law is a kind of superdictionary that knows in advance what any possible combination of words and expressions means.

   • 2014 January 22, Tom Rachman, “O.E.D.'s New Chief Editor Speaks of Its Future”, in The New York Times‎^[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2022-12-06:

     Mr. [Michael] Proffitt was reluctant to place the O.E.D. at the forefront of such a project. The dictionary, he said, lacks resources to transform itself this way. Instead, he advocates a federation of reference works. "The superdictionary may be, in fact, superdictionaries," he said. "What you want is some kind of search that then sends you to the right place."

   • 2019, David Crystal, “The Nature of the Lexicon”, in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 129:

     […] will anyone ever have enough time and motivation to consult them all, for the entire alphabet, and thus arrive at a truly complete superdictionary?

   • 2022 December 21, Geda Paulsen, Maria Tuulik, Ahti Lohk, Ene Vainik, “From verbal to adjectival: evaluating the lexicalization of participles in an Estonian corpus”, in Slovenščina 2.0, volume 10, number 1, Ljubljana: Ljubljana University Press, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 68:

     The current direction in Estonian lexicography is a unification of lexical resources (dictionaries and term bases) into a central superdictionary, the online public dictionary CombiDic.