Dictionary

A STUDENT'SPOLISH-ENGLISHDICTIONARY

Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced,storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans,withoutthepriorpermissioninwritingfromtheauthor.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT <SWAN@PITT.EDU>

INTRODUCTION

A Student’s Polish-English Dictionary

is a web-oriented resourceintended for the English-speaking learner of Polish interested in arriving atthe central and commonest meanings of a word. Designed to overcome theshortcomings, for learners of Polish, of Polish-English dictionaries writtenby and intended for native-speaking Poles, this work contains at presentover 30,000 entries and is constantly growing. It does not attempt completecoverage of archaic or slang words; technical or scientific terms outside therange of common usage; names of uncommon plants and animals; mostgeographic designations; the latest in international borrowings; obcenitiesand vulgarisms. However, most terms related to the social sciences and thehumanities are included.A conservative approach has been applied to the inclusion of recenttransparent borrowings from American popular culture, technology, andbusiness, although some, like

laptop

, are included. The technical apparatusis kept to a minimum and should be mostly self-evident to the English-speaking learner. The user is expected to be familiar with the principles of Polish inflection, hence regular and predictable endings and formations arenot given. For a detailed description of Polish grammar, the user is referredto the author's

Grammar of Contemporary Polish

(Slavica: 2002), or to hisshorter

Polish Verbs and Essentials of Grammar (McGraw-Hill 2007).

USING THE ON-LINE SEARCH ENGINEThe search engine can be set to either Polish-English or English-Polish. Polish words are given a generous number of English glosses. Thesearch engine allows for exact word matches, for exact string matches, orfor “fuzzy” (best available) matches. Delineate exact words and strings withthe symbols ^ (left-hand delineator) and $ (right-hand delineator). Using ^or $ by themselves searches for left-anchored and right-anchored strings,respectively. You may cut and paste words or strings from an on-line textinto the search window. If you are “feeling lucky,” the quickest way toinitiate a search is by darkening a word in an on-line text and hitting theControl key. You may hand-type words into the search window in one of two ways: (1) by using a Unicode Eastern European font in combinationwith a Polish keyboard; (2) by clicking the characters in the Polish alphabetdisplayed above the search window, one by one.It is often quickest to enter a left-hand match up to the point in aword where inflection begins to alter the word-stem. If a search yields nouseful results, try entering the apparent internal root of the word. Therevolving-cog icon shows that a search is underway. “Hits” will be displayedin the order encountered in the dictionary (there is a limit of 100 hits persearch). Clicking on an entry in the results window brings up that line in thefull dictionary on the left, so that closely related items may be examinedand compared in the main dictionary without having to initiate anothersearch.HOW THIS DICTIONARY WAS WRITTEN

The present dictionary more or less wrote itself over the course of anumber of years, as vocabulary lists from various Polish languagetextbooks, frequency lists, readers, and works from contemporaryliterature, film, and mass media were successively added to a constantlygrowing master list of words. With the inclusion of vocabulary from theauthor's

W labiryncie

In the Labyrinth

(a textbook based on a Polishtelevision soap opera), the short-story collection

Opowie

ś

ci mojej

ż

ony

Tales of my Wife

by Miros

∏

aw

˚

urawski, and the filmscripts of Krzysztof Kie

ś

lowski's ten-part film series

Dekalog

The Decalogue,

the word-listbegan to assume the appearance of a real dictionary, containing around20,000 words. Subsequently, logical gaps were filled (for example, in thenumeral and pronoun systems), and cross-references were added to helplink verbal aspect pairs. Sweeps were made through various Polish-onlydictionaries, bringing the entry-count to around 25,000. Especially usefulwas El

ż

bieta Sobol's

Podr

ę

czny s

∏

ownik j

ę

zyka polskiego

A ConciseDictionary of Polish

(PWN, Warsaw, 1996). Since that time, the dictionaryhas been slowly expanding from the author's reading of contemporaryPolish authors and the press. The result is a dictionary that contains morethan 30,000 entries — including almost all words of any frequency incontemporary Polish, augmented by many less frequent words which reflectthe author’s personal reading habits and preferences.To a certain if sporadic extent,

the English-Polish capability of thisdictionary has been enhanced by searching specifically for English words of a more formal or literary nature that might have been otherwiseoverlooked. In this endeavor the Ko

ś

ciuszko Foundation’s

English-PolishDictionary

proved particularly useful. For example, a search in thisdictionary for

rejoinder

led to the addition of the Polish word

riposta

and itsinclusion as a gloss under

replika

.A user-author interface has been included to allow users to makesuggestions and corrections. The author happily entertains all proposals andwill implement them, as long as they meet, or can be modified to meet, thepresentational structure, and the spirit and aims of the work: to helpEnglish-speaking learn and use Polish.PRINCIPLES OF CITATIONEvery effort has been made to make the technical apparatustransparent and unobtrusive, while remianing grammatically informative.Within a word-entry, the derivationally basic form of a word is given first.Derived forms considered to belong to the same lexical item are given next,regardless of alphabetical order. If a form is radically different inalphabetical order from the base word, it will be listed separately and givena cross-reference. Regularly derivable forms are not listed separately unlessa regularly predictable form is nevertheless apt to cause confusion. Forexample, the locative singular of

ocet

,

occie

, is listed, with a reference to

ocet

, because, even though the form is regular, its visual appearance makesthe word difficult to decipher.A tilda is used to represent the head-word in phrasal illustrations, as in

kamie

ƒ

mi -a

stone, rock, flint, gem.

szlachetny ~

gem-stone