Scarcity of illustrative examples in bilingual dictionaries (English-Arabic)‎

الملخص EN

This research paper sheds light on the problem of scarcity of illustrative examples in bilingual (English-Arabic) dictionaries compared with monolingual (English-English) dictionaries.

Due to scarcity of illustrative examples, bilingual dictionaries proved to have been inefficient in rendering meanings of words.

Arab users, having been misled by vague meanings and usages, are becoming less trustful of bilingual dictionaries, but highly opinionated of monolinguals.

As a result, Users are tempted to shift to monolinguals, and this undoubtedly weakens their ties with their mother tongue.

The researcher employs a questionnaire and a number of examples taken from both types of dictionaries to illustrate the difficulty of understanding meanings of words in isolation from their contextual examples.