A student's dictionary of English confronts the learner with more than 50,000 words– an intimidating prospect. The present book shows that a few hundred word elements occur over and over again (affixes for instance like -ation, bio-, de-, -ize, -less, un-). Learning these– their individual meaning and how they combine– is a gigantic step towards understanding the many thousands of complex words of which they form a part. So a lexical item like 'bidirectionally' will easily be analysed and processed as a combination of bi-direct-ion-al-ly, 'in two directions'. The inclusion and clear differentiation of affix synonyms and antonyms completes this new and systematic lexical treatment. A Dictionary of English Affixes thus constitutes a unique linguistic tool for vocabulary expansion as well as text comprehension and analysis.

But in addition, the book will have a quite distinct and separate application in automated language processing.