You Can Look It Up. A threnody for the dictionary

Commentary, January 2026.: “How many times during the past month have you gone to the dictionary, or if not the dictionary then to your computer, to look up a word? I go to mine with some frequency. Here are some of the words within recent weeks I’ve felt the need to look up: “algolagnia,” “orthoepist,” “cromulent,” “himation,” “cosplaying,” and “collocation.” The last word I half-sensed I knew but was less than certain about. I also looked up “despise” and “loath,” to be sure about the difference, if any, between them, and then had to check the difference between the latter when it has an “e” at its end and when it doesn’t. Over the years I must have looked up the word “fiduciary” at least half a dozen times, though I have never used it in print or conversation. I hope to look it up at least six more times before departing the planet. Working with words, it seems, is never done. I’ve added a few neologisms of my own to the English language’s great word mélange. Among them only the word “virtucrat” seems to have survived. Two others—“Bayarerra,” meaning incessant chatter about the splendors of San Francisco and its surroundings, and “youth drag,” for older people who dress young or wear their white hair long or in topknots—have not. Can’t, I guess, win them all. Then there are those words that one knows well but suddenly change their meaning. When did “statistics” become “metrics” and, sometimes, “analytics”? Perhaps around the time that, in sports, “height” became “length.” Sports especially goes in heavily for name-changing and new terms. In football, we now have the “tush-push,” also known as “the brotherly shove,” for the play (mostly the work of the Philadelphia Eagles, from the city of brotherly love) that needs only a yard or two to attain a first-down or touchdown. In basketball, what was once a “dunk” is currently a “flush.” In baseball, whole new statistical categories have been added; to cite only two, OBPS (on-base percentage plus slugging) and RISP (runners in scoring position). A neologist’s work is never done.

On my bookshelves, I discover that I own three standard English dictionaries (two Merriam-Websters and an Oxford Concise), four Latin and three French dictionaries, and single-volume German, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries. I also own Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English along with his Dictionary of Catch Phrases, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, A Basic Dictionary of Saints, The New Bible Dictionary, The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Music, and The Chambers Biographical Dictionary. I once aspired to own The Oxford English Dictionary, which recounts the history along with the meaning of words; it was originally published in 1928 in 10 volumes, then, later republished in 1989 in 20, weighing in at 137.72 pounds and selling for $999 on Amazon…I now rarely go to dictionaries for my definitions but seek them almost exclusively online, either on the dictionary app (supplied by the New Oxford American Dictionary) on my computer or via Google. I use these not because I think them superior but because they are more convenient than walking off to the reference book section of my library, which is in another room in my apartment. In taking this shortcut, I suspect I’m like literally billions of others in this country and abroad…”