My favourite bilingual (and trilingual) dictionaries. Really!

I’ve always enjoyed learning languages. As children my siblings and I were expected to learn French, at least up to a point. It was fun, and memorable—my sister and I recently spoke of those times and about the children’s books we read in French and how much we enjoyed them. Later, I found French classes in school a boring and repetitive chore, but eventually in high school the grammar drills ended and we started reading real literature. That got me re-engaged and restored my fascination with languages. We also had to respond to essay questions in French on examinations and homework assignments. So having a bilingual dictionary became indispensable.

At university I discovered that the library held an extraordinary range of language dictionaries, monolingual as well as bilingual, that were essential for some of the challenging reading assignments we received. I bought myself several “serious” dictionaries before graduation (Latin↔English; German↔English, and French↔English, Latin↔English) as well as a couple pocket dictionaries for on the go. But I always found them challenging to use. Some words have several meanings, depending on context, and the meaning can change when used figuratively or in an idiomatic expression. I would scan the various numbered meanings to find the one that fit—this worked well when reading or trying to understand a recorded text, but when writing, things felt more hit-or-miss. I’m sure some things I wrote at the time must have been hilarious to my teachers.

Dictionaries can also be useful in understanding which prepositions to use with which verbs—something that easily trips up beginning language learners. But they might not be so helpful with the actual spoken or written use of language, where changes of tense, number, mood or voice mutate the form of the verb. So, tools such as the Bescherelle Conjugaison volumes for French (or Le Figaro’s online Le Conjugeur) are an indispensable adjunct to even the best dictionaries. In some languages, certain verbs are associated with changes of case with nouns, pronouns and adjectives (e.g., “eines guten Mannes,” German for “of a good man,” here showing declensions in genitive case); some dictionaries can also be useful in this context, but this is a place where understanding the grammar of a language kicks in.

Moving to Germany in the late 1970s was a test of my linguistic adaptability, even after two years of college German and four weeks of intensive study at the Goethe Institut. Although I had become capable in day-to-day language (other than the sometimes opaque Bavarian Mundart, or dialect, that I heard when working in Munich), writing always left me feeling insecure. I’d post letters that took two hours to write still worrying that I might sound like some kind of nincompoop. No surprise that I’d find myself in the wonderful Munich bookstores standing in the reference section, eyeing the language materials.

Particularly striking was the series of dictionaries published by Duden, called “Deutsche Sprache in 12 Bänden” (German Language in 12 Volumes). It was a virtual linguistic rainbow, with colourfully bound volumes dedicated to Rechtschreibung (spelling/orthography), conventional word meanings, words borrowed from other languages, grammar and etymology, and much more. My book budget was almost non-existent—my academic stipend was insufficient, and my income from work at the Munich’s Großmarkthalle and Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten left little room for discretionary spending.

Two volumes, though, were irresistible. The first was the Stilwörterbuch—a dictionary of style, i.e., a guide to the usage of German vocabulary. I don’t think I’ve ever written more than a couple paragraphs in German without consulting this volume, which gives extensive examples of the appropriate use of German vocabulary. If you wonder whether the word you know is the best possible choice, check it here. If you know a couple words that, to you, are perfect synonyms, the Stilwörterbuch will clarify the precise meaning they convey and how to use them. Not sure of which preposition follows, or of more complex idiomatic usages, this is the place to go. By the time that volume had become too brittle and loose to retain, the pages were well thumbed and sheer sentimentality made it hard for me to bid it farewell.

The other book I purchased with my hard-earned D-mark was the Bildwörterbuch (picture dictionary). Before buying it I found myself returning to the bookstore several times to make use of it. Working in the kitchen of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten there were things I could not identity—sometimes I didn’t even know the nomenclature in English! But the Bildwörterbuch identified everything visually. Page after page showed automobile parts, dentist offices, kitchens, factory assembly lines, gardens, power plants, Renaissance buildings, and Greek temples, with each component carefully identified with the best German term to identify it.

My Bildwörterbuch met the same fate as the Stilwörterbuch—it became loose over the years and, to some degree, dated, so I donated it to the library in Dublin where I was working. (They probably threw it out, saving me the agony of doing so myself.) So imagine my delight after moving to Nice, France, when I came across a used Duden publication I’d not known of before: Bildwörterbuch: Französisch und Englisch (English and French Picture Dictionary). The illustrations in the volume identify more than 28,000 objects in German, French and English. What a find! It’s first use: identifying bicycle parts that needed work or replacement after a rough move from Dublin to Nice. Handlebars—c’est un guidon; valve caps—c’est un capuchon de valve. (It’s just a shame it was published in 1983 before e-bikes became all the rage.)

“I only ever use online dictionaries,” you say. “Google Translate” is for many a default choice. Some are turning to ChatGPT. I’m not immune to the convenience of online dictionaries and other language tools. Google Translate is especially helpful with slang or neologisms, but I distrust it generally otherwise. Instead I’ll pull out the mobile phone to look up newly encountered French words with WordReference. Or if I’m writing and doubt restrains my hand, I might use my newspaper subscriptions (such as Le Figaro) to look up examples of how a word is used. At home, though, I still often stand and walk to the bookcase and pull down one of the few remaining printed dictionaries to set my mind at ease.

Most of the traditional language dictionaries I had collected during the course of a lifetime fell victim to downsizing at retirement. There were admittedly too many, some for languages I studied long ago to be able to better read academic writings rather than to become a speaker of them. Now I wish I’d kept some of them. After all, I still love languages, even if they’re harder and harder for me to learn as time goes on. But who knows, maybe I’ll return to learning Italian someday—after all, Italy’s just 45 minutes away. And part of the fun will be finding again the ideal (printed) Italian↔English dictionary. Andiamo!

Do you have some favourite bilingual dictionaries too? Let me know in the comments!

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