; type of dictionaries, just like Landau (2001:357) has demonstrated that “even an unabridged dictionary must have principles of selection and must exclude many thousands of words and expressions because they are obsolete, rarely used, or too specialized for a general dictionary”. Zgusta (1971:240) believes that the individual factors which influence the lexicographer’s decision can be grouped into the following two broad categories: 1) the form of the lexical unit; 2) the density of the lexical units included in the dictionary. In accordance with Al-Kasimi (1977:109), the practical level would be enhanced if the entry word selection of one dictionary is measured by the following four criteria: 1) the entry words selected by dictionaries include related morphemes; 2) each entry word is in relevance to the given subject; 3) entry words include idioms and two-word verbs; 4) entry words contain cultural-bound words, such as the names of people, places and literature works. Svensén (1993:41) specifies ten general principles that should be obeyed in entry word selection—that is, authenticity, representativeness, coverage, suitability, the prescriptive aspect, the social aspect, the stylistic aspect, the time aspect, the geographical aspect and the aspect of technical language. Based on a systematic and neat analysis about entry words as lexical units, Akins and Rundell (2008:178) have summarized the lexical properties that should be taken into account when deciding headwords that would best meet users’ need, in which they mainly divide headwords into common words and proper names. According to their findings, when selecting a common word as a headword, word class, lexical form, lexical structure and vocabulary types are the four perspectives that need to pay attention to; and proper names fall into three classifications, i.e. people names, place names and other names. Among all the principles and factors deciding on headwords mentioned above, Atkins and Rundell’s theory is standing out for it systematically concludes as complete as the factors—lexically, semantically, and grammatically—when selecting entry words.
2.2 Methods of Entry Word Selection
The traditional way of selecting entry words depends largely on dictionary compilers’ intuition on the basis of a large quantity of card or paper file analyses. Pan Xuelian (2001) provides us with a classic example of entry word selection by using traditional methods. At the preliminary stage of the compilation of Modern Chinese Dictionary (1978), more than 1 million cards and paper files containing about 200,000 Chinese words had been collected, from which the lexicographers picked up 5,300 words as the entry words. Large as the quantity of cards and paper files are, the information conveyed by traditional methods is limited and yet not accurate. Therefore, dictionary compilers are required to possess
