Zitat des Tages über Wörterbücher / Dictionaries:
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.
My job involves searching for 'lost' quotations - that is, trying to find out who came up with a quotable saying that lingers in someone's mind and which they wish to use for their own purpose and which they cannot find in conventional dictionaries of quotation.
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.
I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.
Alphabetical order had to be invented to help people organize the first dictionaries. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where alphabetical order has gone obsolete. Wikipedia is ostensibly in alphabetical order, but, when you think about it, it's not in any order at all. You use a search engine to get into it.