DICTIONARIES
Hefty reference books filled with a comprehensive collection of alphabetized words that could-nay, would-yield the great American novel, if only you could figure out what order to put them in.
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"Let's look it up!" were words trilled for generations by parents in homes populated by children who had yet to learn that a trip to the dictionary was inevitable once they dared ask "What does that mean?" As a mom or dad, you were well aware that the phrase could parlay any pesky question into a learning opportunity, without betraying the fact that you didn't actually know the answer yourself.
Dictionaries often seemed a nuisance to children. "How do I look it up if I don't know how to spell it?" was an oft heard refrain in classrooms. But the notched, featherweight pages were treasured by anyone who harbored a love of words or a crossword puzzle habit.
A taste for the books' delights would likely grow with age: By high school, many a teen would discover that starting an introductory paragraph in an essay by quoting the definition of a word ("According to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 'unoriginal' is defined as…") would get them at least one sentence closer to finishing a research paper.
But dictionary sales have been declining steeply since 2004, dropping by as much as 50 percent in England. A direct result of the decreased use of dictionaries is, arguably, our diminished ability to spell. The constant referencing of difficult words led to generations of decent spellers who knew that memorizing how many Cs and Ms there were in "accommodate" could save a trip to the bookshelf. Typewriters had no squiggly red lines that popped up to indicate faults. Letters and memos and school papers would have to be completely retyped if there wasn't a decent Webster's nearby, leading you to check the spelling of a word even if you were pretty certain of it, just to make sure. In present times, however, there is little shame in announcing that you are a challenged speller. In 2008, the Spelling Society, a British organization, found that out of a thousand people, less than half could correctly spell the words "millennium" and "embarrassed."
Unlike automatic spell-checks in modern computer programs, dictionaries offered up complete definitions for each word, which was a more edifying experience than right-clicking in Microsoft Word in order to deduce a word's meaning by its synonyms. What's more, the big books could lure you in to discovering new words adjacent to the one you wanted-a form of vocabulary expansion that predated the Word-a-Day e-mails that keep getting caught in your spam filter. A desktop widget or iPhone dictionary might be convenient, but the difficulty of browsing through its words has made the "Dictionary" parlor game-stumping partygoers by making up definitions for uncommon words-nearly impossible without just typing in some random letters and hoping that an unusual word will materialize.
Mindlessly flipping through the pages of a dictionary could even, constitute a form of quiet entertainment-especially for those who collected older dictionaries that had yet to take on a more modern, objective tone. Readers of the first English dictionary of note, written by Samuel Johnson in 1755, would've found "orgasm" defined as "sudden vehemence," and "oats" as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."
One sorry result of the migration of dictionaries to the online realm is the downsizing of books that once aimed for comprehensiveness. Because of printing costs and publishers' desires to cater to consumers who want reference books to be streamlined and utilitarian, some words are staring into their graves. In 2008, Great Britain's Collins English Dictionary announced the proposed suspension of several dozen words they'd deemed obsolete, including "agrestic" (rural), "olid" (foul-smelling), and "skirr" (a whirring sound). Meanwhile, the Oxford Junior Dictionary recently removed words that were comparatively quotidian in order to shrink the size of the tome while still making room for a few terms they felt would be more relevant to modern children's lives, like "MP3 player" and "voicemail." The edition is made for children and isn't meant to be all-inclusive, but the paring down of words suggests a decreased chance that kids will discover new and useful terms by just idly flipping through the big book. "Ox," "tulip," "goblin," "duke," "holly," and "lobster" are among the hundred-plus words that the Oxford publishers have axed, as is one that old Johnson would've been particularly sad to see go: "oats."
