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The Grammar Oracle on Your Bookshelf

Would you say you have drank a lot of coffee this week or you have drunk a lot of coffee? Yesterday, you hanged a picture on a wall or you hung it on a wall? What’s the plural of index? What’s the plural of medium? If you can make smart into smarter, can you make intelligent into intelligenter? Can you use the noun guy as an adjective, as in It’s a guy thing? Which spelling is correct: doughnut or donut? Can you graduate college or must you graduate from college?

Questions like these can be baffling. Most people can make good guesses, but they don’t know where to turn for real answers. It’s ironic because those answers are already within reach: they’re all in the dictionary.

We’re taught to use dictionaries to look up word definitions and spellings. But few of us are ever taught that there’s a goldmine of additional information in there. The catch is this: you have to know how to find it.

Most dictionaries have a section near the beginning called “Guide to the Dictionary” or “How to Use the Dictionary” or “Explanatory Notes.” Most also have this information online, though it’s not always as easy to find.

This front matter includes sections with names like “Combining Forms, Prefixes, and Suffixes,” “Attributive Nouns,” “Variants,” and, the most helpful of all, “Inflected Forms.”

Under “Inflected Forms,” a dictionary will explain how it indicates past tense forms. Most explain that regular past tenses and past participles are not included with the dictionary entry for the main verb because the inflected forms follow a standard formula: add -ed for both the simple past tense and the past participle. (Today I walk. Yesterday I walked. In the past I have walked.)

Irregular verbs, on the other hand, do show their past tense and past participle forms, often in bold and in a specific order: first the past tense, then the past participle, then the progressive (-ing) participle.

If you look up eat in most dictionaries, you’ll see right next to the entry word ate, eaten, probably in bold. That means that ate is the simple past tense and eaten is the past participle.

But if you look up walk, you’ll see nothing of the kind next to the entry word. So you know it’s regular and you just add -ed for all its past forms.

When the past tense and past participle are the same, many dictionaries indicate that by showing it just once. For example, after sleep you might see only slept. That tells you that slept is correct in both Yesterday I slept and In the past I have slept.

Often there’s more than one correct option. In those cases, both are listed, sometimes with or or also or something along those lines: dreamed or dreamt.

Under hang, you might see hung, also hanged but it’s not followed by a past participle entry. This means that both forms are correct for the simple past tense and they’re the past participles, too. Yesterday I hanged the picture on the wall. Yesterday I hung the picture on the wall. In the past I have hanged the picture on the wall. In the past I have hung the picture on the wall.

When multiple options are listed, there may be a slight preference toward the first one. Dictionaries sometimes list the more standard form first. Plus, many publishers and print media outlets have a policy of opting for the first form as a way to ensure all their writing is consistent. And that gives further authority to the items listed first.

Past tense forms aren’t the only grammar help you’ll find in the dictionary. Irregular plurals are noted, too. For example, look up index and you’re likely to see right after the entry word indexes or indices, meaning both are correct.

After an adjective like smart you might see smarter, smartest. If you know how to read your dictionary, you know this means that smart has comparative and superlative forms, and that you can turn to the entry for intelligent to see whether it, too, has -er and -est forms (it doesn’t).

Those parts-of-speech labels for verbs, nouns, and so on can be more helpful than most people realize, too. Entries for verbs tell you whether the verb is transitive, intransitive, or both, sometimes with abbreviations like v. tr., i., which are explained in the dictionary’s front matter. This information is invaluable when you want to know whether someone can graduate college or they must graduate from college. If it’s a transitive verb, which it is, graduate can take a direct object, like college.

Many words have multiple spelling options. Doughnut is among them. Sometimes dictionaries will note that the alternative spellings are “variants,” which means that the entry word is the main one (and the one you should opt for if you’re looking for the “better” alternative). And if you see that one spelling has its own entry in the dictionary but the other spelling of the same word does not, that’s another sign that the former is more standard.

Some dictionaries even talk in their first pages about attributive nouns, explaining that even though a word like guy is listed only as a noun, it can be used attributively as an adjective.

This section of the dictionary is short—it takes just a few minutes to read. Once you have, the information you unlock will be well worth the time spent.