People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.
A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.
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.
Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.
The dictionary is like a time capsule of all of human thinking ever since words began to be written down. And exploring where words have come from can increase your understanding of the words themselves and expand your understanding of how to use the words, and all of this change happens in your thinking when you read the words.
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.
Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.
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!'
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.