The long and the short of it: a brief study of the coverage and retrieval processes of shortened forms in English online monolingual learner’s dictionaries from an EFL-user perspective

Abstract

The increasing usage of shortened forms in everyday spoken and written English can prove to be a substantial challenge for EFL learners at any level, both in terms of decoding and, albeit maybe to a lesser extent, encoding. This article takes a learner-based approach and assesses the needs of the learners, maps their lexicographic search routes via the outer access structure, and at the microstructural level it critically analyses the lexicographical portrayal of selected types of shortened form in three of th…