Quotes About Dictionaries

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

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEAR Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet, shallon, shalop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day she would be left silent.

The names of common flowers change from decade to decade, so I spent a lot of time with old outdated dictionaries, with awful flower names like 'mouse-eared chickweed.'

Useful though they are, the vast majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias are poker-faced pieces of work that stick to the facts and present them as soberly - and unstylishly - as possible.

me: why is it upset? shouldn't it be downset? gideon: i will file a lawsuit against the dictionaries first thing tomorrow morning. we're going to tear merriam a new asshole and throw webster inside of it.

It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.

My work, my love of words, became my refuge, both when I was working on bilingual dictionaries for Oxford University Press and then via my involvement with 'Countdown' - and now 'Catsdown,' as I call it.

In fact, within Python, instance and class objects are mostly just dictionaries with links between them.

the attributes of a namespace object are usually implemented as dictionaries, and class inheritance trees are (generally speaking) just dictionaries with links to other dictionaries.

Although we can store functions in dictionaries, too, using them to process implied instances is nowhere near as natural and structured as it is in classes.

I just read them for fun." "Dictionaries?" "Yes." "That doesn't sound like fun. That sounds awful." "Awful used to mean 'full of awe.' The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary." He blinked. "See?" She said. "Fun.