Using the Wrong Dictionary (2014)

I find it's actually interesting when learning a foreign language that I usually discover more about English in the process.

The problem with many dictionaries is that they often try to be too reductionist, as with some of the examples in the article, but with other languages it's interesting because you quickly realise that words don't have a one-to-one mapping but instead words are usually overloaded with multiple meanings, sometimes related, and over languages will have words that overlap in different ways.

Sticking just with English for now, consider "interest" - it can mean a desire to know more about something, a pastime, the money earned when lending money to someone else, a stake in a company, and other meanings besides these. Some of these meanings have other words that describe them, e.g. a pastime is also called a hobby, and some of them have other meanings, e.g. a stake could be something in the ground.

Taking a mathematical view for a moment, if you start thinking about the richness of these words and their meanings, you could almost imagine having dots to represent concepts and words being like a Venn diagram that encompass some of these dots and not other, and have overlaps with other words. You can consider a thesaurus as a book that lists out all these overlapping areas, which are not necessarily transitive across overlaps - e.g. stake can never mean hobby.

If you consider Romance languages, you'll find that English often compresses multiple meanings into one that are distinct in other languages - e.g. "free" is "without payment" or "without restrictions". Many languages split up the ideas in "to know", for instance to know information, to know a person, to recognise something, to understand something, etc. In other cases, English has several words for similar concepts where other languages have one word for all the concepts - e.g. English words for meat are generally Germanic origin for the animal, and French origin for the food you eat, such as cow/beef, pig/ham, sheep/lamb, etc.

I've been learning Chinese for a few years, and it's even more fascinating here as most words are two characters, and those characters themselves usually have their own meanings. If you were to look up the English word, you'll usually find a host of different translations you might be able to use, but if you just try to learn a one-to-one mapping, you'll never really understand them. It only when you look at the meanings of those words that you'll start to understand the nuances a bit better. For instance, the English word "clear" might be translated as (I'll use pinyin rather than characters) to a bunch of words that clearly (sic) have some connection to each other: qingchu (clear about something, can understand something), qingche (clear, transparent, limpid), qingxi (clarity, distinct), mingxian (obvious, evident, distinct), mingbai (understood, obvious, frank, explicit), mingque (clarify, explicit, clear-cut), queding (definite), qinglang (clear day), touming (transparent), xiande (apparent), and many other translations for other meanings that don't really relate in Chinese such as clear conscience, clear diary, clear road, etc... Looking at these Chinese words shows a number of related characters: qing, chu, che, xi, ming, xian, que, lang, and looking at those independently is like seeing big sets of Venn diagrams of concepts, and the individual Chinese words are kind of the Chinese intersections of those concepts and the English word "clear" includes some (but not all) of those concepts, along with some others of its own. For instance, there's a fairly large overlap between chu and che in these words (roughly transparency), ming and lang (roughly brightness), etc. What's really good about Chinese is that after learning enough of these, you start to intuit a meaning for the characters and you can sometimes correctly guess the feeling of the Chinese word without necessarily being able to actually translate it into English.

Whilst learning some of these words, I've discovered new English words, so e.g. qingche is translated as "clear, limpid" and I'd never come across "limpid" before, but now I have a new English word for "completely transparent". Similarly, as I've been learning words for some common medical terms, rather that just being a random word for a condition you've heard of but don't really know what it is, the Chinese word has enough meaning that you can actually understand it, e.g. "pulmonary edema" (I'd heard it before but had no idea what it actually was) in Chinese is "fei shui zhong" - literally a liquid swelling in the lung.

The 1913 Webster is among the standard dictionaries included with the gcide dictionary, accessible via dictd (and the dict command) on Debian (and derived distros: Ubuntu, Mint, etc.). This provides terminal-mode access to word definitions.

You can specify which dictionary you want to use with the '-d' option, or write an alias or bash function to invoke gcide directly, e.g.,

  dgcide () { dict -d gcide "$*" | ${PAGER:-less}; }

Another favourite dictionary is the Online Etymological Dictionary, which shows word origins (not necessarily the present day meaning, but often informing it.

<https://www.etymonline.com/>

That's also possible to query from a terminal via:

  etym () { w3m "https://www.etymonline.com/word/$1"; }

(w3m is a highly-useful, vi-keybindings-based, terminal-mode Web browser: <https://w3m.sourceforge.net/>).

The critique of dictionaries made by “teams” of people, as against a single person, is odd. Like the writer expects lexicography to be just an art form where word lovers can explore and display their idiolects or something.

If a dictionary is supposed to state the meanings of words as those words are used, you have to go out and look at how they’re used, not toil in isolation at your desk, tracing in your mind the lines of force emanating from words. Going out and looking means lexicography is something of an observational science (N.B.: “something of”).

Yes, it’s delightful to plumb the depths of something like the OED. But obsolete or antiquated meanings of words are not necessarily somehow latent in the words as used presently. Language changes; meanings change.

You see the same issue more often with etymologies. Some people seem to think that etymology necessarily sheds light on how the word is used today. Like you’re supposed to go “ah-ha!” when someone shows you the meanings of root words or something. Etymology, too, is delightful to play with, but it, too, has a more rigorous face. But thinking you’ve discovered something deep about the present use of a word because you’ve run across a peculiar or otherwise interesting etymology just reveals a basic misunderstanding of what an etymology is for.

All that said, as a somewhat hyperverbal person myself, I completely understand and appreciate the real delight you can experience in word exploration and wordplay. So I throw no shade at it. But the idea that “you are using the wrong dictionary” or even “using the dictionary wrong” because you are looking for the basic descriptive fact(s) about word usage in the present is asinine. From it wafts the odor of one who spends too much time smelling their own farts.

The article reads as though he has never heard of, much less read any part of, the OED or "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society".

The American Heritage dictionary deserves a mention, not only for its extensive usage panels of writers, but for its practice of putting the most current meanings first, so that the dread “Webster’s defines X as…” is not followed by some antique meaning from the 1700s, but by a current meaning. The OED has no equal, of course, but for a dictionary that one can lift with one hand and read without a magnifier, the AHD is a high value tool.

Similarly, using a true Roget’s Thesaurus is liberating. Grouping words ontologically instead of alphabetically adds a layer of indirection, but as we know from computer science, just one layer of indirection can make all the difference in the world.

In 1985 I was working for DEC in Massachusetts, editing with Emacs. I often used the embedded dictionary to make sure my spelling was correct. Little did I know that the DEC system's Emacs was maintained by a corporate branch in England, so my document had lots of "colour"s, "recognise"s and "analogue"s.

Using the Webster 1913 on Mac OS as the default dictionary, previously discussed on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29733648

Previous:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Using%20the%20Wrong%20Dictiona...

The instructions for installing the dictionary on macOS don't work any more, but the instructions on this page worked for me on macOS Ventura: https://coreyward.svbtle.com/websters-unabridged-dictionary-...

I actually bought this dictionary on the basis of this blog post. (You can find reprints from Christian schooling websites, who want to preserve proper "biblical" English as it was taught centuries ago.) The dictionary is great, but it doesn't have the same definitions as in the article. For example 'sport' is not defined as 'a diversion of the field'. YMMV.

For a comedic take on dictionaries, see Rowan Atkinson and other great actors in the episode "Ink and Incapability", where Black Adder takes on Samuel Johnson and his first dictionary of the English language.

It may be about the wrong dictionary, but this is very much the right kind of writing.