Top 67 Quotes About Dictionaries
#1. At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#2. I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.
Ben Schott
#3. I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?
Rene Denfeld
#4. A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.
Samuel Johnson
#5. [Instead of collecting stamps, he collected dictionaries and encyclopaedias:] Because you can learn more from them.
Linus Pauling
#6. He doesn't know if the words they are using actually mean the things they purport to mean or whether the words have taken on a new significance. They are talking about nothing, after all. And yet these words, these nothings, are all they have, and he wishes there were whole dictionaries of them.
Rachel Joyce
#7. People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers-
a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry.
Anthony Liccione
#8. People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
Steven Pinker
#9. The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.
Mark Twain
#10. I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.
Drew Barrymore
#11. Wake up to think of words ... want to walk through pages of meanings, the links in assonance, alliteration, or just simple sense that moves the eye to leap that way to the next-door play of sound and resonance.
Initially NO
#12. When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce ... in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
Neel Burton
#13. The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.
Benjamin Tucker
#14. Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness.It means profusion of religions.
Shashi Tharoor
#15. Nothing, not even dictionaries, can tell you what anything means," he said. "The reality of things is just sad, for the most part.
Tom Rachman
#16. It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.
Zadie Smith
#18. Innocence is defined in dictionaries as freedom from guilt or sin, especially from lack of knowledge; purity of heart; blamelessness; guilelessness; simplicity, etc.
William Maxwell
#19. Tugs used to think that everyone's name was in the dictionary, and when she had realized it was only hers, both Tugs and Button, she felt suddenly fond and possessive of it, as if this book were put here for her guidance alone.
Anne Ylvisaker
#20. Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.
Alfred North Whitehead
#21. Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.
Terry Pratchett
#22. I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)
Gerhard Richter
#23. 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.
Mortimer J. Adler
#24. One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.
Gottfried Leibniz
#25. I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
William Stafford
#26. If one were loyal to one's nation only because it was good and true ... one would not be loyal to any nation but to truth and goodness. The idea of patriotism would have no place either in our dictionaries or our lives.
Max Eastman
#28. Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.
M.F.K. Fisher
#29. I'm basically a poetry scholar, and I'm happier here in my studio with my row of Chinese dictionaries than I am, frankly, at Lincoln Center.
Sam Hamill
#31. Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#32. Science is defined in the dictionaries as the pursuit of the unknown; yet science today is coming more and more to insist that it not be bothered with this, and it has reached a point where anything that is not already known is frowned upon.
Ivan T. Sanderson
#33. This house is about two dictionaries away from caving in,' she'd say, 'and you're buying duplicates?
Jennifer E. Smith
#34. The title derived from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small dictionaries relate to time.
Kurt Vonnegut
#35. Promises are like silly jokes, told around a table when the food is good and no one has anything to lose by telling a lie or two - lies should have been a synonym for the word 'promise' in dictionaries, but only a few people knew it.
Cameron Jace
#36. Collect and read dictionaries. Take a couple of minutes every day to read a page. Highlight fun words you didn't know before and write them down somewhere else.
Douglas Wilson
#37. Burn all the dictionaries and the things of the world will still be there.
Marty Rubin
#38. 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.
Max Barry
#39. My desk is like a 'U,' so I have my computer and lots of dictionaries because I write in Spanish and I live in English.
Isabel Allende
#41. 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.
Ron Rash
#42. 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.
Terry Teachout
#43. Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.
David Crystal
#44. The trouble with dictionaries is, they tell you more about words than you want to know without answering the question you have.
Andy Rooney
#45. Translators need a lot of skills besides fluency in at least two languages; translators need to be excellent writers in their native language and need to be interested in and skilled at terminology research using both paper dictionaries and the Internet.
Corinne McKay
#47. My job involves searching for 'lost' quotations - that is, trying to find out who came up with a quotable saying that lingers in someone's mind and which they wish to use for their own purpose and which they cannot find in conventional dictionaries of quotation.
Nigel Rees
#48. Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.
David Bowie
#49. Telephone books are, like dictionaries, already out of date the moment they are printed....
Ammon Shea
#50. Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?
Norman MacCaig
#51. Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Samuel Johnson
#52. The right words to express oneself can never be found in any dictionary.
Marty Rubin
#53. We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.
Eric Hoffer
#54. To be honest, I almost never use the dictionary. I just don't like dictionaries. I don't like the way they look, and I don't like what they say inside.
Haruki Murakami
#55. 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.
David Levithan
#56. Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.
James Gleick
#57. My Vocabularies vary, its so exclusionary You'll find my baby pictures in modern dictionaries Next to mighty mercenaries, and visual visionaries
Andre Nickatina
#58. Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.
Gilbert Murray
#59. Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like.
D. A. Carson
#60. Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
Samuel Johnson
#61. Dictionary, n. A malevolent literacy device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.
Ambrose Bierce
#62. I spoke Spanish when I was three, and then Maltese. I love dictionaries. I like foreigners. My dad moved every year before I was 14, and I learnt to like abroad. I'm not scared of change.
John Lloyd
#63. The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries.
Voltaire
#64. In this case, consulting the dictionary would simply mean discovering what one already knew, Dictionaries only provide information that is likely to be useful to everyone
Jose Saramago
#65. Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads ...
Joseph Epstein
#66. One's freedom is one's love and one's love
is one's undoing, it's all in the dictionary...
Duncan McNaughton
#67. 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.'
Vanessa Diffenbaugh