Quotes About English Dictionary

#1. In Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken salad sandwich, you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish-English dictionary, turns out to mean: Eel with big abcess.

Dave Barry

#2. An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive. - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Simon Winchester

#3. Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them.

Leila Aboulela

#4. In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.

Neal Stephenson

#5. 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

#6. My head was spinning. I could think of nothing better to calm it down than the Oxford English Dictionary.

Alan Bradley

#7. The irony of this endeavor is palpable, for English itself is a hopeless hodgepodge of other tongues, with more exceptions than rules, more chaos than order, and enough new words created each day to keep the Oxford English Dictionary folks very, very busy.

George Takei

#8. For my last birthday, Dad bought me a pocket-sized Collins English Dictionary. It would only fit in a pocket that had been specially designed.

Joe Dunthorne

#9. As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

Albert J. Nock

#10. The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it's largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.

Mark Forsyth

#11. Ludicrous concepts ... like the whole idea of a war on terrorism. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?

Terry Jones

#12. If that doesn't seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word "google" is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary - as a verb.

Peter Thiel

#13. Are there any more beautiful words in the English dictionary than 'see you tomorrow?

Jennifer Flackett

#14. How come "burbled" gets to be in the Oxford English Dictionary but "tulgy" doesn't? Hm?

Mike Tucker

#15. Books provide a handy shorthand when Rory's mostly MIA father, Christopher, is first introduced to viewers. Christopher's offer to buy Rory the Compact Oxford English Dictionary she covets is sincere; his lack of ability to follow through on his good intentions is Christopher in a nutshell.

Jennifer Crusie

#16. I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.

Ashwin Sanghi

#17. I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary.

Nas

#18. I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

Terry Pratchett

#19. I'm 36 and if I met a woman of my own age and married her, I'd also be marrying her former life, her past. It might be OK for some people - I don't want to judge it or anything - but it's not for me. It would destroy my creativity.

Henry Rollins

#20. I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives.

Julianna Baggott

#21. Love simply, perpetually exists and that it's a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.

Sharon Salzberg

#22. In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines "buggery" as "heresy, sodomy.

Thomas Szasz

#23. You are more in control of your destiny than you have ever imagined.

Bill Courtney

#24. Something happened to you, they discovered, when you were given the unconditional love and trust of a child.
You wanted to try to deserve it.

Lisa Kleypas

#25. There are no truths, Coyote," I says. "Only stories.

Thomas King

#26. After a desperate fight, to know to congratulate your opponent, if he has beaten you, to shake his hand and go for a drink with him, in my eyes these things are particularly important.

Yannick Noah

#27. Thaumatomane: a person possessed of a passion for magic and wonders, Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson.

Susanna Clarke

#28. Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only five miles to the next place when it is really eight or ten!

John Burroughs

#29. Alas, Tis true that words are queer
And yet my son, you need not fear.
For in this volume can be seen
All English words and what they mean.
(about a Websters dictionary wrapped in a pink bow)

Amor Towles

#30. Unfortunately, there are no mulligans when it comes to pro football contracts.

Jay Mohr

#31. Trinidad's language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it's the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.

Monique Roffey

#32. In standard American English, the word with the most gradations of meaning is probably run. The Random House unabridged dictionary offers one hundred and seventy-eight options, beginning with "to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk" and ending with "melted or liquefied." In

Stephen King

#33. 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

#34. The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary

Dave Kellett

#35. Oliver sat huddled together, in a corner of the cart; bewildered with alarm and apprehension; and figuring strange objects in the gaunt trees, whose branches waved grimly to and fro, as if in some fantastic joy at the desolation of the scene.

Charles Dickens

#36. Pal, if you ever look up the word right in a dictionary, you'll find it's one of the oldest words in the English language. Even so, people have never stopped arguing about what it means. I suspect they always will.

Avi

#37. From a wine critic's perspective, there are far too many innocuous, over-oaked, over-acidified, or over-cropped wines emerging from California. While those sins would not be a problem if the wines sold for under $20, many are in fact $75-$150. That's appalling.

Robert M. Parker Jr.

#38. The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.

Conan O'Brien

#39. Words are good, but there is something better. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the chief matter. Action can only be understood and represented by the spirit.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#40. To be in flow means to be totally absorbed in whatever one is doing at the moment. It occurs when one is fully present and completely focused on the task at hand ... Flow can occur during any human activity, whether work or at play.

Dalai Lama

#41. Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and pretense, and indifferent to the world.

Robert Langlands