An English-French Dictionary of Clipped Word

Présentation

This dictionary deals with the little words which everyone uses every day without even noticing them and which are so liable to escape the grasp of a speaker of another language – clipped words, obtained by back-clipping or apocope (the dropping of one or more final syllables), by front-clipping or aphesis (the dropping of one or more final syllables), by the combination of these two processes and sometimes further transformed, especially in slang, by the addition of a new ending.
The aim is not of course merely to list all these words and say from which longer words they were obtained; an attempt is made here to retrace the history of each of them, its stylistic, semantic and often morphological evolution, to illustrate this with authentic and often pungent or humorous quotations and also to show how each can be translated into the other language. Indeed this is an English-French bilingual dictionary, whose aim is to translate clipped words according to priciples of historical and register fidelity which bilingual dictionaries do not ordinarily set for this type of headword. Thus, clipped words will be shown to have meaning precisely because they are clipped; consequently, this meaning must be preserved and conveyed in translation.
This dictionary thus aims at being different from traditional bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of slang and colloquialisms included, in the structure and content of its articles, in which much space is devoted to the lexicological data, which inform the strictly lexicographical information.