BY THE TIME YOU’VE BEGUN READING THIS PREFACE TODAY, you’ve probably already sent at least one email or text message, updated your social media page, posted a comment at an online zine, or perhaps composed a chapter for your forthcoming self-published novel.
Whether your creations are tweets or tomes, The Describer’s Dictionary means to serve the needs of all communicators, from the published professional, creative-writing student, blogger, and aspiring journalist to the pen-in-hand diarist and dogged snail-mail letter writer.
This revised and expanded Describer’s Dictionary remains, like the original edition, unique in its format: part dictionary and part anthology. We hope it will serve as an indispensable complement to your standard lexicon and thesaurus. Hundred of entries have been added, but the intent of this book is the same: to make thousands of specific words expediently referable. Nouns (to identify things) and adjectives (to describe them) are the essence of the dictionary portion of the book.
The volume is arranged in five sections—Properties of Things, Structures and Spaces, Earth and Sky, Animals, and People—and within each one the quotations are chosen to illustrate the terms or definitions introduced in that section. (A few quotations do not contain a specific term or definition appearing in the dictionary pages but nevertheless are included because they fall within the subject area and exemplify good descriptive writing.) Lexically, this book’s format is for the most part that of a reverse-dictionary, whereby meanings or definitions precede the terms. For example:
having the same shape or boundaries
coextensive
(Properties of Things)
covered or arched and usually columned walkway open on at least one side
gallery, arcade, loggia, cloister
(Structures and Spaces)
small stream
streamlet, brooklet, rivulet, rill, runnel, burn
(Earth and Sky)
having no tail
anurous, acaudal
(Animals)
uneasy
restless, fidgety, fluttery, restive, nervous, unnerved, on edge, jittery, ill at ease, apprehensive, tense, skittish, keyed up, anxious
(People)
A reader might want to know, for instance, the zoological adjective for “like a peacock”; or the momentarily forgotten architectural term that is elusive in the often confusingly clustered and subsumed categories of one’s handy Roget’s; or the right words, for a science-fiction story, to describe features of an apocalyptic landscape; or that word—it’s a French borrowing, isn’t it?—for a nose that in shape is turned up; or which specific color term one should choose for something that is bluish gray.
Many words in the book should be familiar (if not always remembered). Other adjectives and nouns are less common or are technical and probably quite unfamiliar. Because some of the terms or synonyms are somewhat arcane does not mean that they are preferable or more “correct.” Often, successful expert writers use simple language in their verbal depictions (as is shown in so many of this book’s illustrative passages).
Thus the familiar “wrinkled” can be just as apt as “rugose”; and the existence of “hippocrepiform” notwithstanding, many writers, including academicians, will be more likely to say “horseshoe-shaped.” It is always a question of context, voice, or audience—or the writer’s choosing to use the occasional optional (and informative) synonym to avoid repetition.
This edition features more than eight hundred quotations by more than six hundred writers of both fiction and nonfiction. (See the new Index of Quoted Authors.) The quotations have been taken from writers from the nineteenth century to the present, many of them literarily acclaimed nominees or winners of such honors as the National Book Award, MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, and the Pulitzer, O. Henry, Man Booker, and Nobel Prizes. The quotes, from predominantly but not exclusively American and British writers (writing in English), are from diverse genres. Fiction excerpts, from both novels and short stories, are drawn from classic and current general fiction as well as from mystery and espionage fiction, historical novels, and science fiction. Nonfiction quotes are selected from biographies, memoirs, and other books and articles by journalists, humorists, naturalists, scientists, physicians, and travel writers.
We hope that these quotations not only provide engaging illustrations of the use of the terms presented but also will make for interesting, ever browsable reading in their own right—even prompting the reader to look further into a particular book or other works by an author.
The citations should keep one mindful that vivid or memorable writing often involves ineffably subtle touches and obliquities of delineational style—an eye for the striking or surprising detail, a well-crafted sense of phrasing, and the gift of just the right metaphor or simile. As with so many other things, in the art of writing the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Apposite terminology is but a starting point. It is how the words are put together that counts for so much.
All in all, we hope you find this second edition of The Describer’s Dictionary to be ever reliable and surprising as a source of terms for painting pictures with the English language. As for its quotations, we trust that they will offer you little tugs of encouragement and inspiration.