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Description
In the lexicography it has been the policy of most general dictionaries not to include entries for toponyms. The names of geographical names usually appear as dictionary headwords only when they are used allusively or in extended senses, that is they either serve as elements of ordinary words or phrases, or come to function as appellatives by themselves. Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian Comprehensive Dictionary or KBBI) has documented some types of toponyms including capital, country, island, city, river, mountain, etc. yet it still has a limitation on the number and explicit standard of entry selection. It indicates that there is still room to improve the documentation of toponyms in terms of number, entry criteria, and dictionary explanation. This paper discusses toponym documentation in lexicography perspective by gaining insight from the user. There are three issues investigated in this paper including toponym or toponymy and its relevance to linguistics, user research, and dictionary evaluation. This study combines a questionnaire survey and empirical approach. This paper uses a questionnaire survey to thirty one users of Indonesian Comprehensive Dictionary (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia or aka KBBI) which has high exposure to the dictionary as the preliminary stage. The result shows that the majority recommended (i) information addition to the definition, (ii) data checking for consistency and updates, (iii) involvement more relevant stakeholders, and (iv) application development by the addition of several features included audio, illustration, more detail pronunciation, etymology, and variant or synonym. The result of this study is expected to be the alternative to toponym related entry model in KBBI and encourage the dictionary to meet the needs of users and dictionary compilers.
