This post is part of my weekly series, Shelf-Life. Each episode is about a particular book on my bookshelves. For more information see my introductory post. To read other episodes in this series, see the Shelf-Life Index page.

Over the December holidays, I read Louis Menand’s article on dictionaries, “Look It Up¹” in The New Yorker. The article referred to a book by Stefan Fatsis, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary and who can resist a book on dictionaries? So, sitting poolside, I read Fatsis’s book with pleasure and fascination. Both the article and book raise the debate on what a dictionary is and should be, and both assume the death of the print dictionary thanks to how easy it is to look up a word online.

It was during the December holidays of 1978 that I received from my parents, the Macmillan Dictionary for Children. I was fast approaching 7 years old, and as you might imagine, a dictionary is not a gift that rouses the excitement of an almost-seven-year-old boy. This point was emphasized when my younger brother opened his gift, which was the Grease LP. We’d seen Grease over the summer and glancing between my dictionary and his LP, I felt a growing dismay that perhaps my parents thought if I had been given any other gift, I’d shoot my eye out.

It turned out, however, that the Macmillan Dictionary for Children was one of those life-changing books for me: I have never been without a dictionary since.

I still have a copy² of Macmillan Dictionary for Children, with its white cover and black lettering, except for the word “children” which was emphasized in red, as if an adult might mistake this for a “real” dictionary. It was real enough for me. After some initial trepidation, I explored it frequently. It was the heaviest book I’d encountered, weighing in at 750+ pages when all I was used to was the 30 or so pages of a Dr. Seuss book.

The dictionary was entirely self-contained, with instruction in the prefatory matter for how to use it, which I read as a way of figuring things out. Interestingly, the section on “How to Look Up Words” discussed alphabetical order, but made no reference to “guide words.” I don’t know when or how I learned to use guide words when looking up a word, but it is second nature to me today, and I’ve borrowed the concept in my own work. My notebook containing the list of books I’ve read since 1996 has “guide dates” at the top left and right of facing pages.

As a kid, the lush and colorful illustrations made the dictionary a joy to flip through. Flipping through it now, it seems like there are at least two illustrations per page. Indeed, the back-matter lists “1,200” illustrations in color.

The definitions are clear and simple, and made use of frequent examples. For instance, the definition of melt is:

1. To change from a solid to a liquid by heating. The warm sun _melted_ this ice on the pond.

2. To slowly become liquid; dissolve. The lump of sugar _melted_ in the coffee.

This definition sticks in my memory because when I read it, I thought that a better example in the second definition would have been “Dorothy accidentally melted the Wicked Witch with a bucket of water.” (The Wizard of Oz was a holiday favorite of mine when I was six years old.)

That dictionary omitted some words. Peninsula is followed immediately by Penitentiary while Vacuum Cleaner is followed by Vague. Looking back, it seems odd to me that a dictionary for children would leave out important definitions for human reproductive anatomy. It only raised the mystique of the words when they didn’t appear in the dictionary.

I was an assiduous looker-upper of words, and frequently tried to make sense of how to properly pronounce them, using the pronunciation guide at the lower right corner of each page. That took some parsing, and to this day, I still have to slow down to parse the cryptic pronunciation symbols to get to the suggested pronunciation of a word. Looking up words in the Macmillan did not give me a sense of where the word came from. I had to wait for a later dictionary before I could appreciate etymology.

Sometime in high school, or perhaps, as a freshman in college, I obtained Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which was my go-to volume for many, many years.

Today, of course, spelling-checkers—a prime use case for a dictionary—are virtually built into operating systems, as are dictionaries for looking up the definition of words. And of course, the Internet is there for anyone who can access it to find word definitions and even hear pronunciations. Thus, the death knell³ of the printed dictionary. With the tapping of a few keys, or even a voice query to Siri or Alexa, one can have the definition and spelling of any word in a second or two.

For me, there is a joy to looking things up. Maybe it is because I have done this my whole life. Looking up words online or asking an agent to define them for me is like visiting a museum or an⁴ historic site online. It is not the same as traveling there, walking through cavernous halls, or marble ruins. I enjoy the work of pulling the heavy volumes from the shelf beside my desk, rummaging through the pages, to find what I am looking for, reminded of the previous expeditions I’ve made by the yellow highlights I see as the pages flip by. I enjoy the serendipity that frequently accompanies these lexicographical jaunts, encountering words or meanings that I might have missed had I asked Siri to define a word for me. I like comparing definitions between dictionaries. There is a joy in finding the precise word for the context—something that occasionally annoys friends and family when I use a word that no one else is familiar with.

For many years, I had a single dictionary on my shelves. These days my working reference shelf abounds with ten dictionaries. There is the New Oxford American Dictionary, Third Edition which is my go-to volume these days. I still have my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

Years ago, I added Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage edited by Jeremy Butterfield and touted as “Fowler for the 21st Century.” However, I don’t use that volume very often. I obtained an older edition, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Second Edition on the recommendation of one of my favorite essayists, Andy Rooney. In his essay, “Pardon My English⁵,” Rooney writes:

The best book on how to use the English language was written by an Englishman named H. W. Fowler in 1926. Modern English Usage is one of the great books ever written. It is the English language Bible.

This is a rousing recommendation all by itself, but Rooney goes on to add:

Professor Burchfield⁶ has ruined the original by eliminating all Fowler’s delightful little idiosyncrasies without adding any flavor of his own. It’s an acceptable book but no better than a lot of other books on grammar and I resent Burchfield trading on Fowler’s name. Why didn’t he call it Burchfield’s Modern English Grammar and see how many he’d sell?

Other dictionaries on my shelf include The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (fifth edition), The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject, and Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words & Phrases. In addition, I have the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. For tossing into my backpack when I travel or leave the house for a period of time, I have a paperback The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus. Rounding out my reference books are The Concise Dictionary of Quotations, Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, Merriam-Webster’s Word-for-Word Spanish-English Dictionary, and The Oxford Atlas of the World.

When I write, these volumes are frequently sprawled open around me. When I read, I usually have a dictionary at hand. It is rare these days when I encounter a word I don’t know, but sometimes, a word is used in an unfamiliar context, or even in an incorrect context, and I have the dictionary there to check. It is easy, convenient, and less distracting than pulling out my phone to look up a word.

This fascination with words, with dictionaries, with language, and the joy I find in writing likely stem from thoughts and ideas spurred by the Macmillan Dictionary for Children I received when I was six years old. It seemed an odd gift at the time, but it has paid enormous dividends. A few years ago, when my youngest daughter was seven years old, I got her a new edition of Macmillan’s. I prepared her for it, and she took to it much faster than I had. I still find it out on her floor every now and then, proof that she is making use of it, even just to explore and browse.

1. Published as “Is the Dictionary Done For?” in the online edition. ↩︎
2. My copy is a “revised” edition. I don’t know what happened to my original. ↩︎
3. My New Oxford American Dictionary defines death knell as “the tolling of a bell to mark someone’s death; used to refer to the imminent destruction or failure of something.” p. 446. ↩︎
4. The debate that rages on the use of “a” or “an” before a word that begins with “h” is legendary. The modern Fowler’s suggests: “the standard modern approach is to use a (never an) together with an aspirated h (a habitual, a heroic, a historical)” The earlier Fowler’s is a little more tolerant, but stresses that if you say “an historical” you shouldn’t pronounce the “h” sound, so “an -istorical.” I prefer the latter. ↩︎
5. Common Nonsense, p. 181. ↩︎
6. The Butterfield edition that I have is not the same as the Burchfield edition Rooney refers to, but the coincidence of names and the excuse to acquire yet another dictionary led me to obtain the 1965 Fowler version at a Church book sale. And I do prefer it to the Butterfield. ↩︎