Les dictionnaires
Difficultés anglaises

> just An adverb that indicates that something happened a short time previously. In British English it is usually used with the perfect tense of the verb that it accompanies, as in "I have just finished work", "We have just decided to buy a new car", "You've just missed the bus" and "She's just passed her driving test".• In American English, just usually accompanies the past tense of the verb, and some speakers of British English do also, especially in an informal context, as in "I just saw a bad accident on the motorway", "We just noticed that it's snowing" and "He just left".• Just has more than meaning. It can also mean "only" and "exactly". In the sense of "only", care should be taken to position it in the correct place in the sentence. For example, in the sentence "He drank just two glasses of wine", it means that he drank only two glasses of wine, but in the sentence "He just drank two glasses of wine" it means that he very recently drank two glasses of wine. To add to the confusion, although people may be careful about the positioning of just in formal writing they tend not to be in informal writing or speech. Thus someone could say in reply to the questions "How much has he had to drink? Is he fit to drive?", "He just had two glasses of wine", meaning that that was all he had drunk. In speech the meaning is usually obvious from intonation and context.• Just can also be used in the sense of "only" in such sentences as "Just Peter went on holiday with his parents. The other children stayed at home" and "Just" one coat was left. The rest were sold early on". Again care should be taken to place just before the word it refers to in order to avoid ambiguity.• Just can also mean "exactly", as in "I see you have a food processor. That's just what I need" and "Where did you find that cape? That's just what I've been looking for". Pour éviter fautes de grammaire, contresens et confusions. The English Usage Dictionary est le parfait complément des dictionnaires bilingues, du dictionnaire de définitions anglaises et du Thesaurus. Ce dictionnaire signale toutes les difficultés que recèle l'usage d'un mot: orthographe, grammaire, prononciation, homonymies, etc. Exemple d'article du dictionnaire English Usage Dictionary