Even I Don't Read The Dictionary For Fun
An essay about using the dictionary in your essays
Published 9/28/24
This essay represents some of my personal opinions within a discussion about a writing trope. Because politicians, activists, judges and other political figures also use this trope, my discussion intersects their work. My opinions are my own, I’m not a lawyer, and nothing in this essay should be construed as legal advice.
Dictionaries are great as reference material. They do a lot of really important work.
If I don’t know how to spell a word, I might look it up in a dictionary.
When a word comes up in a book and I've never heard it before, I might look for the phonetic pronunciation.
Or maybe even the etymology, if it sounds like a loan word I don't recognize from basic English/Greek/Latin roots. (Even if I've never heard of a "hydrometer", I can probably put together that it's measuring something about water without looking it up.)
Dictionaries sometimes trace specific use cases, like times the word makes a prominent appearance in news or pop culture.
And yes, I might even look up what a word means if I don’t know it.
I am lucky that all of this was part of my formal education in school.
Dictionaries are not great at most other things.
I'm not staying up to date on the latest fandom drama with a dictionary.
If I want to know my future or find a new obscure historical event to obsess over, a dictionary's not the book to scroll through.
And if you're trying to get a point across, skip the dictionary. Keep it out of your video essays, think-pieces, opinion editorials and retrospectives.
Part 1: Did you do the vocabulary homework?
I don't think dictionaries are useful as rhetorical tools. If I am watching a video essay or other type of persuasive writing piece, and the narrator stops what they're doing to say
"Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines 'shoe' as a covering for the foot…",
my blood starts to boil.
A writer typically does something like this to explain a specific piece of vocabulary. Or they might want to distinguish between two forms of a concept. If you use Wikipedia at all and end up on a page that is marked "disambiguation", that's what they're trying to do. Your search term showed up in multiple contexts. Which context do you want?
Often, I choose to interpret quoting a dictionary definition as a form of grace. The definition is an expression of self-awareness, instead of an assumption that the audience is already on board with the writer. No matter what the audience thinks about the topic, here is this solid baseline instead. We can agree on this and then move on. Maybe we can even complicate that original definition. It’s information the writer thinks is important, as efficiently as possible.
Efficient is not the same as smooth or relevant. Or good. Too often, the audience is more on board than you think. Most organizations have complex, nuanced and multi-dimensional definitions for what they study. There are multiple relevant factors for classifying conditions like famine. I’ll go into other examples later.
Copying a definition feels like a remnant of pre-Internet rhetoric. Before something like the Internet, the writer probably couldn't assume that their reader would have a dictionary in their pockets (among the dozens of other things a contemporary smartphone can accomplish). So it made sense for the writer to make sure everyone in the audience was on the same page with specific word choice.
That is a problem the Internet and its extreme convenience have solved.
A search engine will tell you everything you could want to know and even more that you don't about any imaginable topic.
Jorge Luis Borges would have a field day. And if you aren't familiar with his short stories that include motifs of infinite information, I highly recommend them.
All other reason aside, why is the dictionary showing up in your essay, taking up valuable space, when your audience can find the dictionary themselves?
Remember, the dictionary only does a few specific things. A dictionary doesn't tell me much at all about the way real people who think and talk and write use the word "shoe". I might be more interested in specific examples and designs across history. I might be really interested in the modern subculture. I might use it to tell a fly to not bother me.
But (surprise!) I know what a shoe is.
From the beginning, readers look for dictionaries to check spelling and contextual usage more than the strict meaning of an individual word. Webster’s dictionary was especially descriptive and politically motivated for showing American usage of words and American identity. We will get back to that later.
In a move that will date this essay immediately, the Kendrick Lamar-Drake rap diss cycle was not immune to lazy screenshots from the dictionary. You guys need to stoop this low? Seriously?
I start to wonder if the writer thinks I'm an idiot who has never heard basic vocabulary before.
If I'm in a cultural space enough that the YouTube algorithm recommends me multi-hour video essays about writing (or storytelling more generally), I probably know what a retcon is. Like I just mentioned in the beginning.
I probably know what Chekov's gun is. If you don’t know, don’t worry. It’ll show up later.
I'm probably pretty familiar with the hero's journey.
If I'm watching a video essay about analog horror, for example, I'm probably familiar with horror as a concept.
I am at least casually familiar with the craft.
Unless the word you're trying to use is uncommon enough that you don't expect your audience to know it, it doesn't make sense to include a definition at all. Quoting right from the dictionary is the worst version of an already bad technique.
Think of how many times a writer uses a dictionary definition and then has to do something else - an example, a diagram, a qualifier - because the definition was not enough on its own.
It feels kind of insulting that the narrator couldn't bother to talk to me like a person for something as basic as vocabulary. That abrupt shock in tone from a human trying to express an idea to "neutral", dry reference material is exhausting. And it's commonplace to the point of parody.
I don't mean to pick on a particular video because it's a wider trend than that. But at time of writing, I just saw this video about analog horror that felt the need to pull out a dictionary for the word "fear" while assuming the audience is familiar with Five Nights at Freddy's. How much do you really expect your audience to know what you're talking about? Do you think I don't know what the word "fear" means? Does a definition of fear help make your point about a specific online horror subgenre? If it does, why can't you just explain it yourself?
What is this doing here?
Please understand that your audience does not care about the dictionary definition of a word more than the point you are trying to make. If they claim they do, they are probably trying to achieve something else. (We'll get back to this later.)
If you really don't think your audience knows what a word means, explain it in a way that continues making your point. Writers usually need to clarify, contextualize and crop so much of a dictionary entry that it's unrecognizable. You can explain what words mean as you need to. The dictionary probably won't tell me something that you couldn't tell by yourself.
For example,
“This example book is one of the worst pieces of historiography from the twentieth century. The book claims to talk about methods of historians, but it doesn’t mention any notable scholars of the field or review the most influential academic literature about history.”
I already described historiography in context as “methods of historians” while continuing on with my actual discussion. I don’t need a formal definition, much less a dictionary entry. I just needed a quick explanation, matched with an example - and that's not the only way to do it.
You should define specific terms as you use them, especially if you don’t think your audience will be familiar with your topic. That doesn’t mean you need a dictionary. It means you need to (at least passably pretend that you) know what you’re talking about.
I admit this is easier said than done. It’s appealing to make a video essay, copy and paste a quick dictionary definition on screen and continue on with your point. But for the audience, this is just another distraction on screen away from what you’re talking about, a self-fulfilling detour in an attempt at keeping attention.
You have seen this done before, too. The earliest example I happened to find was from 1851, but there may be others I missed.
A block quote stops your idea in place. An in-text citation keeps your idea moving. Writers can use both for pacing a reader. When I was in school, I was encouraged to quote as little as possible and block quote even less, only when absolutely necessary. There was more emphasis on paraphrasing and citing in-text. Most contemporary digital writing seems to prefer that style over quotes. And a dictionary definition is the worst version of this block quoting.
You still have opportunities for corny writing, but it's less obvious this way, at least. Let your themes speak for themselves.
I don’t have a problem with a dictionary screenshot showing up on the screen as a one-second throwaway gag. I have a problem with that screenshot doing explanatory work that you should be doing in your own writing.
Just talk to me. Start with conversation and use, not an out-of-context book.
Part 2: Did you do the assigned reading?
It’s easy to like a definition because they’re catch-all.
There is no nasty nuance. There aren’t any exceptions. The meaning is true as of print, and it won’t change. Or at least it shouldn’t.
Except we know that’s a lie. We’ve seen it.
New slang words show up in the lexicon (a group’s shared vocabulary) constantly. They show up in newspaper articles or podcasts or social media sites or word-of-mouth in communities. Words change, join lexicons and fall out of fashion so quickly, a dictionary can’t keep up.
Saying these aren’t “real words” reeks of gatekeeping. You don’t need to dust off a dictionary to see that someone said something exclusionary and untrue.
Accuracy, for a definition, might need less precision so more people or circumstances are included. Dictionaries have to find a balance between those motivations: precise enough for reference and accurate enough for everyday use (for a particular conversation at a time).
Scientists, for example, tend to use pretty precise definitions that try to remove ambiguity from how non-scientists might use those same words. They also make specific assumptions about models, shapes, and other features of their field because that helps generalize their conclusions.
Games have rules that sometimes require precise definitions so players can identify which actions break the rules.
Your English literature teacher probably gave you homework about vocabulary because some of the classic literature we're expected to know in the western Euro-American canon - Shakespeare, Twain, Fitzgerald - is from different historical and aesthetic contexts than ours. We don't write today in Early Modern English. Or Twain's nineteenth-century Southern American dialects. Or Fitzgerald's Jazz Age slang. Should we use a definition that might not even share the same language as us?
The English language is also notorious for homophones and homonyms, which appear with equal weight in the dictionary. A dictionary won’t tell you which of the multiple meanings of “bat” the author means more than the context of the original phrase. It might not even include the definition of “bat” you’re looking for. Selecting one definition and not others can lead to additional sharpshooting, goalpost-moving and too-literal problems. Assuming you’re even making the point you say you are in the first place.
If philosophy nerds are debating how to classify exactly what kind of cheap and lazy the problem is, please try something else. It’s just not worth it.
I think the generalization allowed by a dictionary hurts more than it helps.
You can refer back to the original context of a word or its use, especially if the word has developed within the past century. I would cite the true original source. That’s wherever the dictionary found the word.
“This research paper from 1956 coined the term ‘parasocial’, a type of one-sided emotional interaction that a fan has with a media personality or fictional character.”
Cool. Done. We're on the same page.
The dictionary might tell you this source I cited, but (again) the dictionary only records words that are already words. You can get this definition from the dictionary, but they got it from the original source!
A dictionary’s vernacular-recording projects are sometimes useful in this retroactive sense. Many dictionaries review the most commonly used words from the year, because they reflect social trends and discourse. They are still not in the explicit business of making new words. Dictionaries will not tell you the context of a word better than the actual context of the word. Linguists and historians are not criticizing, explaining, re-evaluating, translating or doing any other insightful work in the OED that you could not find somewhere else.
People use words first. Dictionaries show up later.
Reference materials like dictionaries are called “tertiary sources” because they don’t give you direct evidence by itself (like a primary source) or even an interpretation of direct evidence (like a secondary source). Many of the same reasons teachers tell their students to not cite a Wikipedia article as a source also apply to the dictionary. It comes across as cheap, like you're just using the first source you found instead of understanding the scholarly or most useful literature. Even Merriam-Webster recommends against it.
On the other hand, you might find a source that does what you would otherwise look for in a dictionary definition.
If you're looking up sources for an essay and you find a source that:
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Appears as a citation in a lot of different research articles,
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Was one of the first sources published before the rest of those articles' bibliographies by year, and
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Comes up often in these articles' introductions,
that source was probably the first to define your topic and give it context. Use that instead.
Reliance on a dictionary definition usually means you are missing something from your recommended reading list. This would be that "passably pretending you know what you're talking about" from earlier.
As another example, this video from an artist about color theory and paint starts with the OED - and then that turns into a launchpad for more complex assumptions and categories, like an international color index. I don’t think the dictionary helped more than the practical color index, but this technique can work fine.
Video game players also use granular vocabulary to describe gameplay feedback and contrast it with the lower-level code logic.
Some foods are identified more by their making process than by their ingredients. Consider non-dairy alternatives to dairy products, with similar end results but wildly different ingredients and preparations.
There are some contexts where a dictionary definition is helpful, like in court rulings. Court rulings are high-stakes decisions that can determine if crimes happened or not. It makes sense (at least from my layman perspective, and without knowing anything about practicing law) for a judge to get rid of as much ambiguity as possible. They should probably use some type of legal dictionary, or at least as many real-life tools as they need to help them out. Vagueness is a big deal, and you can get deep into the weeds about it on your own.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology uses the example of fire hydrants. It’s in the best interest of the public that firefighters can hook up to any hydrant they come across without worrying if their hoses will fit.
If your essay has so much ambiguity that you need a dictionary to sort it out, you don’t sound like you are comfortable with your topic. And if you’re not practicing law or making measurement standards, you can probably find a more suitable source for what you’re explaining.
Examples are also not definitions. Definitions are deductive and apply in the broadest available contexts first. So don't say an example is "the dictionary definition" of a topic when you could use phrases like "textbook example" or "archetype".
Don’t use an industrial pressure washer when a dipped sponge will do just fine. The dictionary can’t help you with some of the more nuanced taxonomy problems of daily life.
Part 3: Do you know when to stop?
I don't know about anyone else, but I do love a good category.
Why are squares rectangles, but rectangles aren't squares? Is a hotdog a sandwich? Can we eat grass? When does a hammer become a chisel? Are the napkins free?
If all you want is an arbitrary category to accomplish a specific task, you can do that without dusting off the dictionary.
We have assumed so far that people who would use (and ask for) a dictionary definition are well-intentioned but are not considering their more appropriate options. We have assumed that people who would ask for a dictionary definition want to understand you better.
Lived experience complicates this assumption, just as it does to so many dictionary entries. There are people who ask questions like this specifically because they do not want to understand you better. They want to waste your time. They want to make you look unprepared. Or else they really just want to ignore you. In this way, demanding a definition - or more than one - is skeptical with malice.
People don’t just use definitions as intellectual exercises, like “debates” or “ideology”. It’s a garbage writing trope with consequences.
Definitions are not tools for clarity anymore. They are tools for waste. They are tools for bigotry. They might say something to the effect of, "This type of person is defined as having these traits. No one else matters. There are no exceptions. The definition is essential." All we have is an excuse to go in a circle. And that circle too often decides many of the experiences we get, instead of the other way around.
It is also difficult to ignore who uses tactics like this (and why) as political rhetoric.
Think of how this tactic was used as a supposed defense of heterosexual marriage conventions during the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. Think of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s fighting against voting practices that excluded descendants of enslaved people. A definition is often an excuse to hurt already marginalized people, as a political weapon. Even law nerds - again, the people who should be taking these types of categories the most seriously, whose work is based on already precise philosophy language, and whose work relies on fundamental applications of written words to practical examples - are not immune to their own biases. Among them are originalists, who assume that certain vocabulary becomes fixed and impractical to reinterpret. And that has consequences when it’s our rights that are assumed, fixed, or interpreted. I’m not here to settle originalism - I mean to exhaustively point out that you are bringing the dictionary’s assumptions and baggage with you into and far outside the courtroom.
Bill Clinton famously was asked about his lawyer’s knowledge that Clinton had an affair and responded that “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Think of who gets to decide what “intelligence” mean - what powers countries have to decide for themselves whether they have committed crimes. Even for benign health reasons, governments can make decisions about what foods are and are not. What exactly gets to be “traditional” and “protected”?
Aren't there “good people on both sides” of a domestic terror attack? Isn’t slavery over? It’s “debt peonage”. Or is this another distraction?
What are you talking about? We aren't using words the same way. That is the cost of precision over accuracy. That is the cost of efficient over good.
Conservative thinkers and activists tend to use this tactic more often, but the idea is politically neutral in its cheapness. Liberal and leftist commentators pull out the same trick. To their credit, actual dictionaries acknowledge this problem and actively try to avoid it.
People in power make decisions about what concepts like "hardship" and "threat" and “exposure” mean, and those decisions have real political consequences. The specific policies are not as important to the point I'm making as the shallow and dismissive way we talk about what we want. A dictionary definition is not a political policy. It's not a voter turnout strategy. It is only a sign of what we value - what gets freedom from expectation and what doesn't, what gets to be true until assumed otherwise and what has to be up for debate. Even choices about the differences between “official” and “unofficial” have far-reaching political consequences.
As one of my favorite books puts in terrifyingly simple words: "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."
In this way, dictionaries are not necessarily political texts more than they are linguistic texts - but their use (and the theoretical framework of that use) has political, social, medical, and even religious consequences. The politics is an extension of the epistemics. The definition is true because it’s in the dictionary, isn’t it? Easy to say that while ignoring a lot of the collaborative and multi-disciplinary work that’s essential to making a dictionary. (“The Dictionary People” by Sarah Ogilvie was an immense help in detailing that work.)
If some parts of those definitions matter more than others, how useful are they, really? A definition is an epistemic claim, something we can "know" as "truth". But if some parts of that knowledge matter more than others to the point that one definition counts and another doesn't, then why is "the truth" being selective? If "the truth" doesn't match what people experience, how truthful is it? Then the language is not matching the truth. If definition doesn't match experience, the definition is wrong, not the other way around.
The appeal of a static meaning and an archetypal example means no more thinking, reconsidering, compassion is required. People who use dictionary definitions to write other people out of existence are assholes.
Unfortunately, the problem's conceptual opposite, demanding excessive clarification or repetition as a distraction tactic, is just as annoying.
When a writer demands more accuracy than a dictionary definition can give, set aside the book and check for accuracy in experience. The dictionary might get you into a problem with a troll, but it will not get you out. Explain your concept and how the concept is used in a specific context. Compare it to something similar. Any of the common strategies for getting a point across still work, even without the appearance of the OED.
Staying inside the dictionary also has problems.
When you pick an individual word and follow it from one dictionary entry to another - tracing its etymology or even acknowledging that definitions are made of words with their own definitions - can turn into a recursive spiral of word association. Tools we use to keep information, just like a dictionary or encyclopedia, treat loss as an inevitability. Like other reference books, dictionaries are history-keeping projects that span from etymology to what limited contextual usage it can give.
Remember, the dictionary doesn’t always keep up with larger cultural changes to words. And sometimes, it just has simple mistakes because humans are the ones who make dictionaries.
Why keep the meanings that don't help people live better lives? Why cite a cold collection of words that does not know what you want from it?
And sure, this all is pedantic. I used too much effort and consideration for such a small quirk.
Hey, wait a minute. That was another way to include an explanation without resorting to quoting a dictionary.
You might also reasonably say that a focus on this style of presentation misses the point you’re trying to make. But you pulled out the dictionary in the first place. I am taking you to the logical conclusions of the choice you made.
You can see for yourself that leaning too heavily on a definition can sink your argument and make you bump into a lot of other problems on the way down. Everything from reducing a nuanced idea into a definition (overgeneralization) to shifting burden of proof because a definition isn’t good enough to explain what you mean - even changing your premise because a counterexample “doesn’t count” - all comes from the idea that the dictionary can make your point for you.
There are resources that can show you how to write while avoiding these problems. Ask your library, especially if you're a college student. They might take you through an exercise like this, about variables in scientific studies:
I saw this ad on Twitter.​
That leads to this article from the Council for Disability Awareness, which repeats the definition from the ad:
The article links to a source for that definition from an editorial in Public Health.
And that article gets that definition from a scientific journal article that studied specific factors that led to loneliness in adults older than 50 years old.
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The point of this exercise is that we can find a chain of specific, contextual resources behind a seemingly simple definition - and we can make sense of why those resources are focused the way they are. Remember that tertiary sources problem from earlier? If you sourced this definition from anything along this chain that isn't that final scientific journal article, you have missed some important context and may not even know it.
Assuming the dictionary even has most of what you need to know ignores how knowledgeable people reach conclusions about what they study. It ignores how power influences what we think of as “truth”. It ignores social contexts in which rigid definitional categories are simply not useful. That ignoring does not come from a place of wanting to understand more about the world around us.
Isn’t that why you came to the dictionary in the first place?
If you’re going to use your own contextual meaning of your words, why are you going to the dictionary?
To recap
The real smoking gun in all of this is my copy of Webster’s New World Dictionary: Second College Edition, my beautiful red household dictionary from 1984.
After the practical guide about how to read an individual entry, there is an essay by the American linguist Charlton Laird called “Language and the Dictionary”. Laird is thorough at outlining the same problems we’ve discussed already: that dictionaries inherently work against being out-of-date, that they work best when they describe instead of demand word usage, that they sometimes trade convenience for total clarity, that standards come from people using words and not the other way around.
The dictionary does interesting work as a document of its author’s current values, like all artwork. The dictionary is often too exclusive for an inclusive social world, too vague for specific practical contexts, and too inconsiderate of more insightful work even within its own field. And assumptions that the dictionary is a living document like a constitution don’t match the prescribed use of definition for making exclusionary categories.
I like dictionaries for what they do. They're a wonderful tool for you. They're not your source. A dictionary is not the end of what you are trying to learn about - it's the beginning. The dictionary is not necessarily the norm.
Just because there's technically no such thing as vegetables doesn't mean you shouldn't eat vegetables as part of your healthy diet. Just because a product you get at the supermarket has all the strict characteristics and flavors to be called a dessert doesn't mean it comes anywhere close to your mom's homemade cherry cheesecake. Semantic ambiguity is not an excuse to be stupid or to hurt people.
It’s also not an excuse to ignore context.
If you are leaning towards using a dictionary definition, here are some additional questions to ask yourself:
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Are you making a point about the dictionary definition’s wording, or are you just including the dictionary definition because you need to explain what the word means?
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Do you expect that your audience won’t recognize the word you’re defining without a dictionary definition?
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Is this the only time you’re using a dictionary in your essay? If it is, does another source you’re citing explain the concept? Can you explain the concept yourself?
You can do this. I believe in you. You don’t need all of this baggage. You can write in your own words. And you can cite better sources when you need to. The dictionary deserves more consideration and appreciation than this cheap pop. And if you use personal definitions, it’s still on you to clarify yourself in context.
Don’t use the dictionary as an excuse to not do the work.
Endnote: Angela Collier is a theoretical physicist who makes a lot of great videos about the history of science and science communication. If you want more of this type of discussion specifically about physics, her YouTube channel is fantastic.