Dictionary Day

A Misunderstood Word Poisons Everything Around It

They think looking up a word is a small, optional courtesy. It’s the difference between understanding what you read and misunderstanding it.

Without knowing a word, you don’t really understand the sentence it sits in. And here’s the dangerous part. Most people don’t stop and admit they don’t know the word. They assign it a meaning, a guess based on how it sounds or where they have half-seen it before, and then they keep reading as if they got it right. One wrong guess bends the meaning of a sentence.

Several wrong guesses across a chapter, and you have misunderstood the entire argument while feeling completely confident that you followed it.

I see this in young people constantly, but it’s every generation.

We all do it. We attach a meaning to a word that’s not the meaning, and the misunderstanding spreads outward through everything built on top of it. Dictionary Day, which falls on October 16, the birthday of American dictionary pioneer Noah Webster, is a good day to take that problem seriously. The fix is simple. Stop guessing. Look it up.

Watch: Noah Webster - Father of American Culture - Unknown Founder - Author of the Dictionary, Traveling Through History

How I Use a Dictionary

I’ve used dictionaries my entire life, and I use them in a way that might strike you as excessive. When I look up a word, I don’t just grab the first definition and move on. I read the entire entry.

That means all the definitions, even the ones that don’t fit my sentence, and it means the derivation, the origin of the word, where it came from and how it traveled into English.

I want to understand where it’s been along with what the word means. This is why a good etymology reference is one of my favorite tools, books like the Dictionary of Word Origins and the Concise Dictionary of English Etymology. They exist to answer exactly that question. (More on Toponymity, on words born from place names)

Sometimes I’ll even pull up a map and trace the path the word took, from one language and place to another, over centuries.

Maybe that’s just me. But it’s never once been a waste of time, because a word’s history almost always sharpens its meaning. You understand a word more completely when you know the road it traveled to reach you. (See also The Etymologicon)

You don’t have to go as far as the map.

But reading the full entry instead of snatching the first definition is a habit worth building. The shades of meaning, the second and third definitions, the origin, all of it makes you a more precise reader and a more precise writer. Precision with words is the game.

Why Weird Al Made a Hit Out of This

If all of this sounds stuffy, let me point you to the least stuffy possible example. Weird Al Yankovic wrote a hit song about exactly this, called Word Crimes, a parody of Blurred Lines built entirely out of grammar, spelling, and usage mistakes that drive careful people up the wall.

The reason that song works, and the reason it struck such a nerve, is that everybody has felt the frustration it describes.

The wrong word, the misused term, the spelling error that changes the meaning, these things grate because they break communication. I wrote a whole piece on the lessons hiding in that song, the grammar and spelling lessons from Word Crimes, because underneath the comedy is a serious point. My favorite example from it is the missing comma that turns a cooking show host into a cannibal.

One piece of punctuation, and you’re eating people. That’s funny until you realize the same kind of error, with a misunderstood word instead of a missing comma, is happening silently in people’s reading all the time.

Weird Al turned word precision into something you can dance to. That’s the spirit of Dictionary Day. Caring about words is the thing that lets language work, and there’s real pleasure in getting it right.

Words Are the Writer’s Only Material

For a writer, this goes from important to existential. Words are the only material we have. A carpenter has wood. A writer has words, and nothing else. If you don’t understand your own material precisely, you can’t build anything reliable with it.

The almost-right word isn’t good enough. There’s a real difference between a word that’s close and the word that’s exactly right, and a good writer feels that difference and chases the exact one. That’s why I read the full entries, why I track derivations, why I care about the shade of meaning that separates two near-synonyms, and why a reference like the Dictionary of Concise Writing has a place on my shelf.

The reader may never consciously notice that you picked the precise word, but they feel it. Precise writing reads as clear and confident.

Imprecise writing reads as fuzzy, even when the reader can’t say why. The dictionary is where that precision comes from, and growing your vocabulary is how you give yourself more exact tools to reach for.

How do you mark Dictionary Day?

Look up a word you’ve been faking. You have one. Everybody has a handful of words they use or read without being totally sure of, coasting on a guess. Pick one and look it up, and read the whole entry while you’re there, including where it came from. You’ll probably be a little surprised, and you’ll know that word for good.

As a reader, build the habit of stopping when you hit a word you’re not sure of, instead of guessing past it. It slows you down at first and then it speeds up your understanding for the rest of your life. If you write, treat the dictionary as a precision instrument. (See the Concise Oxford English Dictionary) Reach for the exact word.

And if you want to enjoy the day, go listen to Word Crimes and laugh at how many of the mistakes you recognize. Caring about words can be fun, precise, and a little nerdy all at once. October 16 is a good day to stop guessing at the words you only half know, and to remember that understanding starts with understanding the words.

Dictionary Day FAQ