Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary by Merriam-Webster

No dictionary is perfect, and of course this one is no match for the Oxford Dictionary of English, but it’s a good solid college-level dictionary, small enough to be portable for those of us intellectuals who move around a lot, but large enough to cover most of the words you’ll come up against up until your GREs.Įveryone should own a collegiate dictionary-that is, a substantial, if still abridged, dictionary with far more information than you find by just googling a word-or that would even fit in a pocket dictionary.

A good dictionary, like this one, takes usage into account and provides at least some etymological background to help see the ways in which meaning is contingent, historical, and shifting. The power of words is enormous, and the only way to truly tap into that power is to understand the ways in which they are used. On the other hand, I didn’t really stick to it, so the process of my vocabulary expansion isn’t as well documented as it could be. People who use internet sources to define words will never have such a record – or at least not until e-books become more functional and permanent. I did this for maybe two or three years, with reasonable consistency, which means I can now see that I looked up “abscess” on, “antinomian” sometime in 1991, and “auctorial” on New Years, 1992. While I was in college, one of my professors (since departed) made a fascinating suggestion: every time you look up a word in your dictionary, highlight it and write the date you looked it up next to it. My parents gave me this, which I’ve kept all these years, not out of sentiment, but because it is a vital tool for intellectual work. Suess as much as the next person, it strikes me as a fairly useless, even insulting, present to give a young adult as they prepare to up their academic game and take on the challenges and competition of University life. Urn:oclc:316064310 Republisher_date 20170209194516 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 1650 Scandate 20170208235339 Scanner recently learned that it is considered standard to gift recent High School graduates, on their way to college with a copy of

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Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary by Merriam-Webster