For some reason, who really knows why, I’ve been thinking about dictionaries a lot lately. Specifically, I’ve been wondering if anybody actually buys dictionaries anymore.
Clearly, the answer to that must be yes. Dictionaries are still published and still stocked in bookstores. Sales must be strong enough, or at least steady enough, to cling to a niche of the ink-and-paper-brick-and-mortar bookselling industry. But just as clearly, sales of dictionaries aren’t what they used to be.
Without doing anything that might actually constitute real research, I did a little poking around the Internet and came up with a lot of different answers. Depending on which articles I trusted and how I interpreted them, the bottom line seemed to be that dictionary sales have certainly declined, though perhaps not as much as you might expect. A drop of ten to fifteen percent was cited by more than one source, which sounds bad until you consider how much worse it could be in this day and age of Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster Online and dozens of other free, keyboard-accessible dictionaries, including my own online favorite, The Free Dictionary. And let’s not even talk about the true evil in our midst, that bane of an educated, literate society — built-in spellcheck functions, which millions of people consider a reliable tool but which help only about a third of the time, the other two-thirds leading to silly, needless, confusing, embarrassing mistakes. As a matter of fact, the only thing worse than built-in spellcheck is built-in grammar checking, which … well, I can’t even tell you what I really think of that, except that I’d like to find the person who invented it, strap him in a chair, and feed him ground up pages of The Elements of Style until he admitted his wickedness.
It seems inevitable that real printed dictionaries will vanish some day, just as it now seems likely that the entire concept of books printed on paper and bound between covers will also eventually disappear, fading into the mists of history and existing only on the shadowy shelves of seldom-visited museum-libraries. I doubt we’ll reach that place in our lifetimes, but we’ve certainly started down the long path that will take our children’s children there. In the meantime, I’m happy that dictionaries and other “old-fashioned” reference books are still with us.
When I was a kid (or what I often call a “little, little kid,” meaning somewhere under the age of twelve or so), I used to love reading the dictionary. Encyclopedias, too. I was blessed to grow up in a family that had no shortage of either. In fact, we had two complete sets of encyclopedias, a Britannica and a Compton’s. I would sit for hours in the room my parents called the den, grazing random encyclopedia articles, browsing the dictionary from letter to letter, dog-earing the pages that had cool words on them. That might explain my knack for winning classroom spelling bees, but come to think of it, it probably also explains my propensity for awkward, run-on sentences and my talent for blurting out random, useless facts at the drop of a hat. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to cozy up to reference books as a kid, I’d probably be a less obnoxious person — but I would almost surely be a poorer one, as well.
If I had grown up thirty or thirty-five years later, it’s doubtful I would have spent hours online at The Free Dictionary, stuffing my head with letters and words. Although I did learn something neat there just this morning (their homepage “Article of the Day” on tesselations), it’s just not the same.
I don’t often have morals in the things I write, but today I find, much to my surprise, that I actually do. Here it is: If you’ve got a kid, particularly one under the age of twelve, buy him or her a dictionary, a real one, an honest to God, genuine book full of words, preferably one with hard covers. You’ll get a strange look, as if you’d just presented a box of socks and underwear on Christmas morning, and the volume will probably spend a fair amount of time tossed in the corner or lost under the bed. But you never know. Someday you might be cleaning their room and find the book and pick it up and discover a handful of highlighted words, underlined definitions or dogeared pages.
Wouldn’t that be a great feeling?
, which I waited far too many years before reading.