Our Big New Dictionaries
Earl Gray in the mug [Brendan Greeley]
For a good year and a half we had only one dictionary in our office, the Concise Oxford on my desk. There’s no reason, really, why I should prefer it. An embarrassing hint of Anglophilia, or perhaps the association with the 21,730-page Oxford English Dictionary, which — as I was informed at breakfast this very morning — is too large to own until a house is bought.
But now we have three, and they are all larger and more American than my Oxford Concise, which I will take home with me. Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, had so much fun on our show The Word of the Year that she sent us THREE BRAND-NEW COPIES of the NOAD, one of which you see plunked down like a flagstone on my desk, above. And yesterday we looked up the word “Bergamot,” which — as only David knew — is “an oily substance extracted from the rind of the fruit of a dwarf variety of the Seville orange tree.”
What’s your reference of choice?
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January 4th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Well, speaking of reference books in general, whenever I get a chance to plug The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Robert Audi, I take it.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
It is certainly not a classic, but I adore the utility of “The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition”
January 4th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
I like that tiny little red dictionary at the bottom of my Mac. – it’s a God send – it made the Mac worth the extra $$$ I guess the best part is, I don’t need to have the correct spelling, which always made this horrific speller take longer to look up words.
I’m still trying to work in that word “mooble” from the show –
January 5th, 2007 at 2:29 am
After a day behind the reference desk, I would have to say…. Google. What? Google?
That’s what I said. Google.
Google is too powerful for most people to get really good results, but… if you know how and when, it can be truly awesome.
Another net reference source that can be truly helpful is technorati.com. I think of it as my roll-a-dex of experts. If a patron asks me something I have never heard of, I put it into technorati (and selecting “a lot of authority”) inevitably come up with links to relevant information. Yay.
Another place that is oh-so-useful for a librarian that can’t spell (and for patrons that are “sure the title is ____”), is Amazon.com. The search is so forgiving. I can find the real spelling or title, plug it back into the sirsidynix monster that searches my library’s items (and demands correct spellings and exact titles – boo!), and *poof*, another patron gets the information they want or need.
January 5th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
In our house, whenever a word comes up that no one can define clearly, my step-son, “Uh-oh, it’s time for the big red book.” That woud be the “Random House Webster’s College Dictionary”. I don’t know why this one has gotten so much play. We have several dictionaries. (Brendan, I have a house and I still dream of the Oxford Unabridged.}
Nother, I, too, love the dictionary on the Mac and I will readily search dictionaires online. Still, there is nothing like the tactile experience of that solid binding around those densely packed filmy pages with the subtle tabbing to allow you to open near where you need to be but not close enough to avoid having to flip a few pages hearing that ‘fssk’ sound ever so lightly. And the unexpected words that caress your eyes along the way. I can’t tell you the number of time we’ve been looking up a word when the person with the book says, “I know we were looking up b____, but listen to this word!”
Also ever-present on my reference shelf, is a Thesaurus. It’s perfect in those moments of “what’s that word that sort of means……”
January 5th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
I have an ancient piece of software called “The American Heritage Dictionary V 3.6a” which came with an ancient windows 3.1 laptop I bought on ebay. The beautiful thing is you can copy/paste the executable onto any computer and it still works (currently on my windows xp box). I keep a shortcut in my quicklaunch bar and look up words with it daily. This is faster than using the internet (no ads or annoying popups). Noteworthy features include: thesaurus + cultural reference dictionary. Rocket Sauce!
January 5th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Being a rabid logophile, I love dictionaries – I own 5 including the 2 volume compact OED. I like the Merriam-Webster Collegiate the best for general purpose word research but my MW 3rd Unabridged monster is good for obscurities (the kind Jeffrey Kacirk loves to point out.) I have the American Heritage and find it the poorest of the lot but it seems to be the authority of choice for many. When I have access to the web, I don’t bother with print as it’s easier to just check a few sources (although a lot of definitions seem to have come from a common source.) My dream is to own the complete Dictionary of American Regional English but it’s pricey and not yet finished – I imagine someday I’ll justify the expense and acquire it.
January 7th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
I’ll use any reference that doesn’t cop a ‘tude over irregardless
January 8th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
I hope this program explores the old chestnut of whether a dictionary’s proper function is to explain how words ought properly to be used, or instead to illustrate how folks actually use them. One thinks of Nero Wolfe, tossing the notoriously permissive Merriam-Webster Third Unabridged into the fire: “Do you use ‘infer’ and ‘imply’ interchangeably? This book says you may. Pfui.”
I would also be interested to learn where each of today’s leading dictionaries fall along the spectrum between permissiveness and proscriptiveness.
OliverCranglesParrot: true story from more years past than I care to recall. I enrolled in a New York state bar review course, but in a “tape delay” section meeting in Newark, NJ. One morning, the instructor explained some point of law and pronounced its applicability regardless of circumstances. Then, after a dramatic pause, “that’s irregardless, for those of you watching in New Jersey.” Until that very moment, I had not known that anyone considered irregardless anything other than the Queen’s English!
January 9th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
mjfhistorian: great anecdote … I tell ya, Jersey gets no respect … no respect.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
It was a huge extravagance, but I bought the The Compact Oxford English Dictionary a few years back. The OED has been shrunk down to print so tiny and to pages so thin that an entire documentary should be aired on the technological feat itself. It came with a thick round glass magnifier reminiscent of a paperweight. It is great fun testing my eyesight by trying to read the miniscule type unaided. (Some days easier than others. No, I don’t know why.) I have always maintained that if a book doesn’t have words one has never read anywhere before it’s an indication that the author was like a soprano afraid to ‘reach for the high note.’ And if one reads Dorothy Sayers or Vladimir Nabokov without recourse to a dictionary and never finds an unfamiliar word, then bravo to you! Like some strange folks, my first encounter with some words remains vividly brilliant in my mind. The word ‘penultimate’ I first stumbled upon while reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer in college. (Just one of many memorable word-events!) My Compact OED gets frequent use, and since I can’t buy and drive a Rolls Royce auto or savor beluga caviar, I use it to acheive an inferior state of bliss. I may never rise to William Safire’s level, but my OED gives me a tool useful in climbing slowly behind him! P.S. For those who read Spanish, my goal in that language would be to read Ramon de Valle-Inclan unaided. Sadly, I don’t own the complete dictionary of the Real Academia Española.