Setting an Assignment: Read the Dictionary

"Do you read the dictionary?" French author Théophile Gautier once asked a young poet. "It is the most fruitful and interesting of books."

No doubt Ammon Shea would agree. As he recounts in Reading the OED, Shea devoted a year to perusing every one of the 59 million words on the 21,730 pages in the 12 volumes of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

A good portion of Shea's book attends to the "strange and lovely words" that he ran across during his marathon read. These curios include anonymuncule ("an anonymous, small-time writer"), curtain-lecture ("a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed"), goat drunk ("made lascivious by alcohol"), grinagog ("a person who is constantly grinning"), lectory ("a place for reading"), nod-crafty ("given to nodding the head with an air of great wisdom"), onomatomania ("vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word"), palaeolatry ("excessive reverence for that which is old"), and scrouge ("to inconvenience or discomfort a person by pressing against him or her by standing too close").

The author happily admits that he's a confirmed vocabularian ("one who pays too much attention to words").

Nonetheless, by the time he reaches the letter s, Shea begins to lose interest in "out of town words" (William S. Buckley's affectionate phrase for archaisms and inkhorn terms). For instance, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (a kind of lung disease, also spelled -oconiosis) is obviously a long word (45 letters, 19 syllables) but not an especially useful or interesting one. "While the treatment of hard words certainly does matter," Shea says, "I think that a much better indication of what makes a dictionary great is how it treats the most common words of the language." This insight leads him to set an assignment for his readers, a lexicographical exercise that illustrates the richness of English and the complexities involved in crafting precise definitions.

You might want to try this yourself:

[H]ave a go at defining a common word of your choice--a short simple one that you use all the time. How about . . .

Set.

Go ahead and try to define set. Write down everything you can think of about this simple little word. Jot down every meaning you can think of, and then compare your list of meanings and senses of set with the one that's in the OED.

Exhaustive is not quite the right word to describe the OED's definition of set, as it is the length of a novel, taking up more than twenty-five pages in the OED. . . . It is broken down into hundreds of senses, and most of those senses have various subgroupings that distinguish it even further. This is a word you can spend a week or more wallowing in. You can roll around in there and lose sight of what language actually is as your mind struggles to differentiate among the hundreds of shades of meaning that can be produced by three letters.

You should read it.

I'm serious; you should read it, all sixty-thousand-odd words of it. . . .

To give you an idea of how comprehensive the definition of this word is, consider that, as a verb, it has 155 main senses listed, some of which (such as set up) have as many as seventy subsenses. Set functions not only as a verb, but also as an adjective (nine main senses), a noun (forty-eight main senses), and a conjunction (one sense).
(Ammon Shea, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. Perigree, 2009)

If you don't have the OED by your side, feel free to look up set in any good dictionary, such as the online version of the Macmillan Dictionary (either the American edition or the British edition). Be sure to read all the definitions, synonyms, and examples--including the countless phrases and phrasal verbs derived from set. As Shea says, "If you are not interested in reading [the entry] for your own edification, then you should read it as a silent tribute to all the lexicographers who slaved away for untold thousands of hours crafting this very long definition for this very short word."

When you're done, you may find yourself agreeing with comedian Steven Wright, who said, "I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything."

More About Dictionaries:

• The Earliest English Dictionaries
• Top 10 Reference Works for Writers and Editors
• Which "Webster's Dictionary" Is the Real Thing?
• "Isolated Phenomena of Language: Grammar and Dictionary," by Henry Sweet

Image: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, by Ammon Shea (Perigree trade paperback, 2009)