Quotes About Dictionaries

Tout ce qui nous émeut, tu le partages. Mais ce qui t'arrive, nous l'ignorons. Il faudrait être cent papillons pour lire toutes tes pages. Il y en a d'entre vous qui sont comme des dictionnaires; ceux qui les cueillent ont envie de faire relier toutes ces feuilles. Moi, j'aime les roses épistolaires.

I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.

Dictionaries collect our words both to preserve them and to give them back to us, to allow us to see what names we have given to our experience throughout time, and also to discard some of those names and renew them in an ongoing ritual of baptism.... they confirm and invigorate the lifeblood of a language.

In the middle of the 20th century, aspirations to sound 'proper' were passionately pursued. Dictionaries as late as the Seventies include many pronunciations that could cut the proverbial glass.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

None of the dictionaries can accurately define stupidity than practically stupid itself; it authenticates an actual definition.

One cannot search a word, Evilize in English dictionaries since that's a new one, which one may use as; Evil only evils and Evilizes all the subjects and objects.

One's thought that wears the word of dictionaries, and surpasses its context, becomes a vision, which understands a few figures that carry a visionary quality and proficiency.

Undoubtedly, neutrality is such a context that only subsists and twists in the dictionaries and books, not in the minds practically.

Ontologies have been variously construed as classification schemes, taxonomies, hierarchies, thesauri, controlled vocabularies, terminologies and even dictionaries. While they may display characteristics reminiscent of each of these systems, to equate ontologies with any one type of representational structure is to diminish both their function and their potential in the evolution of the Semantic Web.44

The earliest dictionaries were collections of criminal slang, swapped amongst ne'er-do-wells as a means of evading the authorities or indeed any outsider who might threaten the trade.

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.

I write in order to live and I live in order to write, and I've come close to imagining that writing and living might merge completely: I would live in the company of dictionaries, deep in some provincial retreat, in the mornings I would go for a walk in the woods, in the afternoons I would blacken a few sheets of paper, in the evenings I would relax perhaps by listening to a bit of music.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.

While the word proactivity is now fairly common in management literature, it is a word you won't find in most dictionaries. It means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.

Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two.

For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author's period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

You evidently do not suffer from "quotation-hunger" as I do! I get all the dictionaries of quotations I can meet with, as I always want to know where a quotation comes from.

The first dictionaries were glossaries of Homeric words, intended to help Romans read the Iliad and Odyssey as well as other Greek literature employing the 'archaic' Homeric vocabulary.

A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.