Question

I found the following declaration in my c Book, can anyone explain it:

    char *dic[][40]={
"atlas", "A volume of maps",
"car", "a vehicle",
"telephone", "a communication device",
"", ""
    }

Here what does the 40 means i.e. which dimension this is?

Answer 1

dic is a two-dimensional array of char*; its dimensions are 1 x 40.

The 40 is given in the declarator and the 1 is implied by the fact that there is only one array in the initializer. The full initializer would have another set of braces, e.g.,

char *dic[][40] =
{
    {
        "atlas",     "A volume of maps",
        "car",       "a vehicle",
        "telephone", "a communication device",
         "",         ""
    }
};

With the extra braces, it is clearer that the implicit dimension is 1.

Each element in the two-dimensional array is a pointer of type char*. The first eight pointers are initialized to point to the eight string literals given in the initializer.