[sword-devel] Glossary vs. Dictionary

[Chris Little]

On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Christian Renz wrote:

> >You won't find the latest help file much help with that. As far as I know, 
> >there are no glossaries to test. So I didn't have any results to document.
> 
> This option always confused me... Can somebody give me a quick
> definition and an example for "Glossary"(as opposed to dictionary)  in
> a Sword context? Thanks!

>From Websters:

glossary: a collection of textual glosses or of specialized terms with 
their meanings

gloss[3]: a brief explanation (as in the margin or between the lines of a 
text) of a difficult or obscure word or expression

dictionary: A book containing the words of a language, arranged
alphabetically, with explanations of their meanings; a lexicon; a
vocabulary; a wordbook.



Lexica & dictionaries are really the same.  For Sword, we tend to label 
dictionaries of biblical languages lexica and dictionaries of modern 
vernacular languages dictionaries.  Dictionaries with long entries may be 
labeled encyclopedias.  Thus Thayer's, BDB, or Louw-Nida would all be 
"lexica" by our usage while Webster's, Smith's Bible Dictionary, or the 
Anchor Bible Dictionary would be "dictionaries".

Glossaries are collections of glosses, which are short (one- or two-word 
usually) definitions of words.  For our purposes thus far, they are always 
between two different languages, e.g. German and English or English and 
Latin.

There are a hundred or so glossaries in the beta area but they are all 
broken right now because of a change Troy made to BibleCS.  They'll work 
fine in any other frontend right now, but they will eventually be fixed.

--Chris