Quotes About Lexicon

Who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand.

Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.

Technology is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives, and the accompanying geeky lexicon has infiltrated every facet of our modern day society.

It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word.

Emotions are none of these. As a result, there's a huge blind spot in the language of emotion, vast holes in the lexicon that we don't even know we're missing. We have thousands of words for different types of finches and schooners and historical undergarments, but only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience.

The dictionary is an ossuary of empty words.

Ah, this blasted habit of mine of inventing or deriving words!

Is there another word for synonym?

The trouble with the dictionary is that you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up to see how it is spelled.

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.

Lexicographer—A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered.

It was an idea consonant with Trench's underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

Diction involves the choice of words for their precise meaning and sound, the arrangement of those words, and their selection for effect.

The most effective way to avoid dejection, motivated or gratuitous, is to take a dictionary, preferably of a language you scarcely know, and to look up word after word in it, making sure they are the kind you will never use.

I love to invent words but even when I think I've invented one or a new variation on a word, I often find that someone else has already made use of it.

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.

Quite often people ask me 'Is there a word for... ' and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill.

Use the right word, not its second cousin.

If not, let me offer you some instruction in at least one area: get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there.

get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there. p. 591

Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

book is a piece of digital information, written in linear, one-dimensional and one-directional form and defined by a code that transliterates a small alphabet of signs into a large lexicon of meanings through the order of their groupings.