If you have a young children, then you will know the benefits of having a good children's dictionary to hand.
A good dictionary will contain more than definitions to help young minds grow and learn new things.
It needs to highlight how a word sounds, as well as what it means.
For children, this is important because knowing how to pronounce a word will give them more confidence to read out aloud and they will also be more likely to use the word in conversation as well as including it in their writing.
The pronunciation of a word should normally come directly after the word itself, in the dictionary.
This pronunciation is written in symbols and whilst some of the symbols look like regular letters in the English alphabet, others do not.
It can take a bit of time getting used to deciphering these codes - you will have seen these yourself: one looks like an upside down e, another looks like an n with an extra long and curvy right-hand side and so on.
There are also some symbols that look like normal letters but may have lines or dots above them or below them.
These characters can be a bit daunting when you first see them but if you get a good dictionary, such as Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, then you will see that it has a pronunciation key in the lower right-hand corner of every odd-numbered page.
And if that doesn't provide enough information, it contains a multi-page guide to pronunciation that discusses the finer points of pronunciation and how it has evolved over time.
Some dictionaries have loads of useful and not so useful information in the back of the book.
Style guides for punctuation, capitalization, documentation of sources, and forms of address are useful to have.
So are definitions of medical and scientific symbols.
In all, have a good children's dictionary at home and make your child feel comfortable and at ease with it.
Show them how to look up the definitions of words, help them to sound out and pronounce words they have never used before, and get them accustomed to using the dictionary to refer to when writing stories or doing their homework.
Even if they learn 1 new word a week, they will have learn 52 new words at the end of a year.
Their vocabulary will be growing and as a direct result of this, their command of the English language will be excellent.
All this, from using the dictionary as a tool to learning.