ABSTRACT
The making and marketing of dictionaries is a thriving industry, and the student has a fairly wide choice of reputable products. The wording of the American dictionary entry implies that the rain check is offered by the baseball club, and hence, in figurative extension, by the host-figure in the social game. There are two kinds of definitional technique. One is the categorical explanation that casts its definition in a form generally equivalent to the grammatical category of the word itself. The other type of ‘definitional’ explanation is not yet so familiar in lexicographical practice, though it has a long and fruitful history in the classroom and as the informal method of ordinary social exchanges. The two ‘definitional’ techniques interestingly imply different attitudes of the maker to the recipient of the definition, together with different views of the function of language and the purpose of dictionaries.
