Quotes on Dictionary

Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word 'impossible' is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

And that brings us to tonight's word: Truthiness. Now I'm sure some of the word-police, the 'wordanistas' over at Websters, are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word!' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, what did or didn't happen.

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

A song doesn't just come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out. 'No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

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

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

"...piling up zeros in your bank account, or cars in your driveway, won't in and of itself make you successful. Rather, true success is based on a constant flow of giving and recieving. In fact, if you look up affluence in the dictionary, you'll see its root is a Latin phrase meaning "to flow with abundance". So in order to be truly affluent, you must always let what you have recieved flow back into the world."

Love is the most important thing in the world. Hate, we should remove from the dictionary.

Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

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.

The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.