Coming up on Word Matters are canna of the lexica graphical type.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea,
Peter Sakalowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
It's possible to use a dictionary day in and day out for years without knowing its code in full.
On the printed dictionary page,
do you know how the pair of words at the top of the page really gets to be there?
How about those dots separating the entry words into parts?
Neither is quite what it seems.
I'll start us off.
If you use a print dictionary,
which I recommend that everyone do
because there's something so nice about leafing through the pages of a dictionary,
But in a print dictionary,
you will find at the top of each entry page a set of words,
and those words are intended to orient the reader so that the reader knows what vocabulary is covered on that particular page.
We call them guide words.
There's a set on the left side of the book and a set on the right side of the book,
and it tells you all the different words that are on that page.
So for example,