superdictionary

plural superdictionaries

1. human sciencesAn exceptionally comprehensive dictionary, which includes all other dictionaries.

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

   1998, Harriet Murav, Russia's Legal Fictions, Ann Arbor, M.I.: University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 104

   3 more examples

   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."

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

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

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

   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.

   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