My dictionary sucks. (I’m not too happy with my thesaurus, either.) I have The Highly Selective Thesaurus and looked up “elf” and “goblin.” I got back two interesting looking words, “ouphe” for “elf” and something like “barghest” for “goblin.” Since I’m attempting NaNoWriMo and the itch I have to scratch takes place in a wonderous and magical world, but I don’t want to use the same old names for non-human stuff—should any happen by—and I don’t want to make something up. So I looked in my dictionary for those words. Nothing. Grrrrrr.
There is a “Book Warehouse” nearby, so I decide to go there and see if they have any cheap dictionaries. They don’t. Not in English, anyway.
I go to Borders. There are all sorts of fancy titles like “Abridged Oxford English Dictionary and Language Guide” or something like that. I don’t want a language guide. I don’t want color pictures. I don’t want a free CD ROM. (My laptop at home is old and makes CDs both a real hassle and totally unreliable, and I don’t have an internet connection there. Plus, I like having a book to refer to.) I narrow it down to the two fattest dictionaries I can find. The Oxford one has neither “ouphe” nor “barghest.” The other, and American Heritage Color Picture Cutsie Thingie does have “barghest,” but not “ouphe.” I step back and begin re-scanning the shelves. I find an actual plain old dictionary by Oxford, 400,000 words instead of the 250,000 in the dictionary/language guide. Ah-ha! Damn! Neither “barghest” nor “ouphe” in that one either. Dammit.
Next stop, js learns that people don’t sell many used dictionaries in this area. Shit.
Why do they make a 400,000 word dictionary with words like “door” and “wheel”? Can’t they make a 400,000 word dictionary with all those grade-school words replaced by the obscure or unusual words I actually want to look up? It’s very annoying.
No internet hookup at home. I use dictionary.com all the time at work and when I did have internet at home; but now that I’ve moved, I can’t us it at home.
Maybe you find one of the real sources they use offline. They’re listed with the defs. I have an old collegiate dictionary at home that has some very obscure things in it. But, it’s lacking in new-ish words.
Mine is a collegiate one as well. I was really hoping to find a big, fat dictionary from half a century ago at the used book store. No such luck.
I wish I could afford the shrunken down OED with the magnifying glass. (Or the full set.)
There was an unabridged Webster’s at the bookstore, with free CD ROM which made me wonder how much was actually in the book itself, but it was $120. Out of my range for sure.
If you’re asking for a dictionary recommendation, this professional writer uses a hardback copy of Webster’s New World College Dictionary. It’s never failed me, and lists both of the words you mentioned.
As for a thesaurus, I use a hardbound copy of Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus. It is very comprehensive, includes slang terms, and organizes itself two ways, so you can associate words by definition or according to general themes.
I went to amazon and what they showed me only had 163,000 entries. WTF?! Why would the Oxford dic. with four-hundred thousand entries not have those two words, but a dic. less than half the size does. Does it only have bigger words? I’m so confused.
Their absence is merely annoying. It just confuses me that dictionary A, which is half the size of dictionary B, isn’t subsumed (probably not the right word) by dictionary B. I guess they have to cut something. I guess I just never thought about it before.
Okay, I’m at the OED online and it says that the second edition of the OED has just under 300,000 entries. So I obviously must have misread the back of the one I was looking at. Now the Shorter OED has 500,000 definitions but only 97,000 headwords.
When I do get around to buying a new dictionary, how am I ever going to get past the lexicographical doublespeak?!
Webster’s New World is the offcial dictionary of the Associated Press so you’ll find a great many professional writers, particularly of non-fiction, choose it as their standard dictionary. (barghest: a mountain spirit).
As to why some dictionaries contain some words that others don’t… well, for instance, Webster’s New World is a dictionary of specifically American English. Words familiar to the American speaker of English, that is to say. Some dictionaries, most notably the Unabridged OED, claim to comprehensively catalogue every word in the language… but most only include the several hundred thousand they believe to be most relevant right now. Which words those are, precisely, is a matter for the Editorial department.
You might try yard sales/estate sales/thrift shops in your area if you’d prefer an older dictionary.
It’s not so much that I preferred one. The dictionaries on the shelves seemed eager to note how many new words they had, which led me to think, i.e. hope, that dictionaries were known for having shelf lives and therefore a used bookstore could be fruitful and inexpensive.
Does the OED really contain every English word? (Not the ones since publication, of course.) Is it unambiguously the best?
Is it the best? Depends on your definition, but it’s certainly the most complete. The compact version (which can only be read with a magnifying glass) is 2,400 pages, and I believe the regular-print version is 20 volumes.
Not a book, but at least it’s free: Project Gutenberg has the fulltext Webster’s Unabridged dictionary (1913 edition) available for free download: for example, here. (It’s about 12MB zipped, in 11 files.) It has both
and
but if you’re looking for newer vocabulary it won’t help much.