Англо-русский учебный словарь

The criterion for method has been ease in use, or, in the words of James Murray, "eloquence to the eye". Clutter in the text reduces clarity and adds to eyestrain. For this reason cross-references are avoided as far as possible. Much use is made of clearly marked divisions and the dictionary is well provided with indications of style and shades of meaning, and with occasional grammatical notes and cautions. The student should thus be able to find what he wants easily and quickly, without constant recourse either to his grammar or to a Russian-English dictionary.

There is a wealth of illustrative phrases, couched in the language of "everyday** and these should help to give the student the feel of spoken Russian.

COVERAGE (LEXIS)

The nature of the dictionary has determined the vocabulary. Very full treatment has been given to the few basic words which figure so largely in our daily use—do, get, give, go, make, put, way, etc., as also to prepositions. Special attention is paid to verbs in combination with prepositions or adverbial particles, which are usually translated by Russian verbal prefixes. These are of the first importance to the student. All the commoner senses of the selected English headwords have been covered, but not necessarily rare ones. Thus for instance when a verb is nearly always used in the transitive form, although the intransi­tive form exists (or vice versa), the rare usage may be ignored.

To 'save space, abstract nouns and adverbs derived directly from adjectives are not given, e.g. tender adj нежный is given, but not tenderness n нежность, nor tenderly adv нежно.

In groups of cognate words, such as biological, biologist, biology, one or more of the terms may be omitted. Similarly English words which are translated by direct transliteration into Russian are often omitted, e.g. morgue морг, or nymph нимфа. In such cases it will be easy for the student to form or find these for himself.

THE LANGUAGE