There is a reason some books are classified as reference books. Reading them cover to cover provides little more than bragging rights, if you can find the right person to brag to. I got, and deserved, a number of odd looks from many people when informing them of my decision to read the dictionary. My overall goal of reading every book in my house as a prelude to putting serious effort into writing my own stories was lost as soon as I told them my first book was the dictionary. It is an odd choice but it made sense in my head. Perhaps I failed to articulate the rest of my quest or frame the dictionary’s place in it. I do know that I was overconfident, foolish, and even a bit arrogant in my early perceptions of my ability to tackle this book. For all that, I apologize.
Before we get any further along the path, let me explain my system for rating books. It’s very different from my movie rating scale, but I feel that the written word can be broken into bigger chunks easier than one can parse the components of a film. This is a young rating system and subject to change.
As a fan of Stephen King’s work, my first two categories are nicknamed Toolbox Level 1 and Toolbox Level 2. Level 1 contains structural essentials like vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and mechanics. More often than not, a published work should score high here because some editor has already made sure that words are spelled correctly and that the work doesn’t fall apart grammatically or mechanically speaking. You don’t get published (or shouldn’t get published) if you don’t have a firm grasp on these things. There is still room for nitpicking word choice and sentence structure though.
Level 2 is the broad category of style. How does the author compose paragraphs, develop characters, and describe the action? How does the dialogue sound? Does the author have a competent and independent voice, or does he or she sound phony, pretentious, or objectionable in some other way? If Level 1 is like engineering (it has to be there to function), then Level 2 is akin to architecture (the little design touches that set it apart, be they necessary or not).
The third category is Fulfillment of Purpose. Does this book accomplish what it set out to do? Here creeps in a little more subjectivity. I take into account the genre of the book with Level 2 to a degree, but it becomes more relevant here.
The fourth and final category is Reading Experience. This is as subjective as it gets. Did I enjoy this book and why or why not? Think of this as the recommendation factor. A book may be well-written and an adequate example of its genre, but if it’s not my cup of tea, I’ll let you know here. Feel free to debate me on any of my four assessment areas, but this is where most disagreement will originate.
All four assessment areas receive equal standing. I award letter grades to each category and use a GPA-style grading scale (A = 4.0, A- = 3.667, etc.) to create a final score. In time, I will create another list section so you readers can browse through my reading history by title, author, and score.
Now then, the dictionary…
Toolbox Level 1: A-
Because most of the dictionary contains brief sentences or fragments for its definitions, there’s little fault-finding here. The introductory section contained a few sentences that wore out their welcome and some instances of clunky grammar. Beyond that, it did a pretty good job of using as many simple words as possible in constructing the definitions. The dictionary is full of vocabulary but it is also a reference book. A few of the higher-level science and mathematical definitions required fancier words, but I was pleased that they stuck with layman’s terms as often as possible.
Toolbox Level 2: A-
Most of my assessment criteria in this category are rendered moot by the dictionary’s genre. Aside from the introductory section, usage notes, and section headers, there’s very little variation from the necessary straightforward delivery of definitions and descriptions. There doesn’t need to be. It’s a dictionary. Nobody expects style and flair from a dictionary. MW gets it, which is why they hold back on style. They did get a little hoity-toity defending MW’s product as the best and putting down the imitators though. The font size was a pain at times, but you either have tiny font or a very large dictionary. Pick your poison.
Fulfillment of Purpose: A-
This is a very good reference book. The only points I have against it are minor quibbles. I caught two or three spelling/sorting mistakes. This looks bad for a book that most people use to ensure accurate spelling, but when you consider that it’s only a small handful of mistakes among hundreds of thousands of entries, it’s hard to knock it too much for these few instances.
The Geographic Names section left me wanting more. It did not provide the meanings of city/mountain/river/etc. names in their native tongue. I’m sure there are some interesting reasons for many of these names, but no etymology was provided. It’s a minor point, and I doubt most people use a dictionary for geographic names (let alone know it’s in there to begin with).
I walked away with two other points to ponder. First, there are a lot of definitions that include the word or a form of the word being defined. That was always considered a no-no in school. Does this mean MW is wrong, or were many of my teachers wrong?
Second, I question the future of print dictionaries. While my dictionary fulfills its purpose as a reference book very well, it was in its prime over 20 years ago. Not long after publication, my copy was already outdated. A dictionary is like a financial statement- it’s a snapshot in time. The English language is always changing, for better or worse. My dictionary is still useful today but not quite as useful as it used to be. With the rise of the internet not long after my dictionary was published, I have to wonder how many dictionaries get purchased in this day and age of Google, spell check, auto-correct, and Wikipedia. The Oxford English Dictionary abandoned publishing physical dictionaries several years ago. I wonder if and when MW might follow suit.
Reading Experience: D-
You knew this was coming, right? I didn’t give it an F because there were interesting words along the way, and some of the usage notes were enlightening and entertaining. An F means that I hated reading the book, failed to connect with it at all, and had to fight to get through it. Those few aforementioned positives don’t change the fact that my will to read was broken several times during this experience.
The slow pace of each page (upwards of 15 minutes each) and the lack of any kind of narrative made it easy to fall asleep while reading. I thought short bursts of information would be easy to work through, but the opposite was true. Some letters were more interesting than others, but all but the shortest sections had their frustrating moments.
Reading the dictionary was laborious and this experience makes me think twice about how soon I want to read my German-to-English dictionary or my wife’s French-to-English dictionary. Perhaps we’ll dispose of them before the opportunity or desire to read them arises.
Overall Score: 2.917 out of 4 (high B-)
This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. In a way, I am glad I got this out of the way first. It took forever, I retained little, and I did not enjoy the process of reading razor-thin pages a handful at a time. But I crossed the finish line. For what it’s worth, I can say that I read the dictionary. More than that, I took on an almost impossible task and finished it. I hope this means that I am capable of finishing other, more relevant, tasks that seem difficult to surmount.
