1. How is a dictionary orgnized?

2. Dictionaries are books that list all the words in a language.

3. To make dictionaries easier to use, the words are organized in alphabetical order. So to use a dictionary easily, you must know how to alphabetize words.

4. Since there are so many words in a dictionary, guide words are used to help you locate a word quickly.
What are guide words?

5. Guide words are found at the top of each page
Guide words are found at the top of each page. They tell you the first and last word that is found on that page.

6. How do guide words help you find a word quickly?
Instead of looking at each word on a page, which could take forever, you just look at the guide words and then use what you know about alphabetizing words to decide if your word would be found on that page.

7. Let's see what that means...
Let’s pretend you are looking up the word, science. First we would turn to the S section

8. Then you would use the guide words and what you know about alphabetizing words to decide the correct page in the S section.

9. You would look at the guide words at the top of each page and decide between which ones our word would come in alphabetical order.

10. Which one of these pages would contain the word science?
Let’s do that for the word science-
Which one of these pages would contain the word science?

11. science stamp - summer sandwich - seventy
The page with the guide words-
stamp - summer
Or the page with the words-
sandwich - seventy