Erin McKean Dictionary Quotations

If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.

Most consumers don't have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one... so they flip the book over, then go to the back, and it says, 'Over 250,000 entries.' And they go, 'Great, this dictionary must be awesome!'

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.

Most of the words you know and love and use every day are not words you learned by looking them up in a dictionary and reading a definition.