Dictionaries. Can’t live without them.

On an average day, I look up about three to five words and phrases online at Dictionary.com. Before the Internet became so handy, it was my 1980 pocket Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary that I relied on. Not that I look up every single word. Most of the time, I’m just too lazy but usually, I’m able to infer the meaning of the word in doubt from the sentence itself.

Understanding a word from the way it’s used is the basis of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The pinnacle of lexicography, the OED not only provides the pronunciation and definition of a word like other standard dictionaries, it also lists in chronological order quotations in which the words were used.

Simon Winchester writes in The Professor and the Madman:


Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries; how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation; and perhaps most important of all, how and more exactly

when each word slipped into the language in the first place.
Until I read this book, it never occurred to me that readers and writers didn’t always have access to dictionaries. The word “dictionary” wasn’t even in the English vocabulary until the late 1600’s. The first useful English dictionary encompassing both commonly used and rarely used words was published in 1755 by Samuel Johnson. The first edition of the OED took more than 70 years to complete, was finally published in 1928, and consisted of 12 volumes.

In elementary school, one of my teachers often ran contests where we competed to see who was the fastest to find certain words in the dictionary. I always won and even now take very little time to look up words in any English, Spanish, Chinese, or Japanese dictionaries. I probably wouldn’t be as speedy looking up words in the 20-volume current edition of the OED, but fortunately, it is now available online and on CD-ROM.