In my teenage years, I believed my father knew every word in the English language. Whenever I stumbled upon an unfamiliar phrase, I would run to him and he would explain it with the calm authority of a seasoned lexicographer. For years, I thought he was a walking dictionary. One of my proudest childhood moments came when I received my first dictionary as a prize at a school annual day – a heavy, dignified object that felt like a passport into a larger world.
As time passed, the dictionary quietly disappeared from my daily life. Words moved onto screens; curiosity became a search bar. Then one afternoon, in a dusty bookstore, I stumbled upon a rare 1949 second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary – nearly 3,250 pages of linguistic ambition mounted on its own stand. This dictionary was put together by 207 specialists and had over 6,00,000 words! For $75, I carried home not just a book but a monument to patience. Opening it felt like returning to a slower, more deliberate relationship with language.
The story of dictionaries stretches far beyond personal memory. Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia (1728) helped inspire Samuel Johnson’s monumental A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson spent eight years crafting definitions enriched with literary quotations, transforming lexicography into an art form. His personality leapt from every page and was later immortalised in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Across the Atlantic, Noah Webster reshaped language itself through A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) and An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), simplifying spellings and forging an American linguistic identity. The ambition of lexicography reached its zenith with the Oxford English Dictionary, conceived in 1857 and published between 1884 and 1928 – a collaborative enterprise tracing the ancestry of words through hundreds of thousands of entries.
Alongside such works emerged projects like the Dictionary of National Biography, cataloguing lives with the same devotion lexicographers gave to vocabulary. But dictionaries are not solely Western; ancient glossaries in Mesopotamia and India’s Amarakosha (a thesaurus in Sanskrit) reveal humanity’s early desire to classify language. Today in India, bilingual dictionaries allow movement between languages.
The world of dictionaries has also inspired remarkable books. Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman recounts the extraordinary human drama behind the Oxford English Dictionary. Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED chronicles the eccentric quest to read the entire dictionary – a humorous climb up what he calls the ‘word lover’s Mount Everest’. David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary transforms definitions into fragments of a love story, while Shashi Tharoor’s A Wonderland of Words celebrates the Indian reinvention of English, delighting in its quirks, variations and playful possibilities.
For centuries, dictionaries demanded reverence. They were enormous volumes requiring stands, magnifying glasses and patience. Today, words arrive instantly. Online platforms like Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and Wiktionary democratise access, placing entire linguistic universes in our pockets. Definitions update in real time; pronunciations come with audio; new slang enters the lexicon within weeks. Digital dictionaries are powerful and inclusive, yet they have altered our relationship with language. We no longer wander through words; we retrieve them.
And still, certain reference works continue to shape modern thought – Roget’s Thesaurus redefining how writers perceive relationships between words, Black’s Law Dictionary shaping the language of justice, and evolving psychological lexicons influencing how we understand ourselves. The dictionary remains a mirror to society’s changing consciousness.
Perhaps, the question is not whether dictionaries are dying but whether they are transforming. The printed dictionary offered permanence and authority; the digital dictionary offers immediacy and fluidity. One taught patience; the other encourages adaptability. Perhaps dictionaries endure, not because we need definitions, but because we continue to search for meaning.
(The writer’s views are personal)