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Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

The trouble with the dictionary is that you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up to see how it is spelled.

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.

A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted.

Most consumers don't have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one... so they flip the book over, then go to the back, and it says, 'Over 250,000 entries.' And they go, 'Great, this dictionary must be awesome!'

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.