The interesting thing you discover when you start acquiring multiple dictionaries—beyond an exciting new awareness of lower-back pain—is how idiosyncratic they can be for books with a common goal. Each has a sense of personality, implicitly communicated through their covers, their interior layout and typography, their paper stock, their illustrations, and, naturally, their words, definitions, and examples.
I wrote the first two dozen stories for this project exclusively with the New Oxford American Dictionary, before I wondered: Would using other dictionaries significantly alter the stories I was writing? Could you identify a story written with one dictionary over another? Every story in this book is annotated with the dictionaries used to write it, so maybe you’ll be able to answer those questions for yourself. Listed below are all the dictionaries referenced in this book, in the order they were acquired.
Third edition, 2010, Oxford University Press
NOAD, which is what you’re allowed to call the New Oxford American Dictionary when you know it as intimately as I do, enjoys a level of ubiquity possibly unmatched by the other dictionaries in this list, being the default dictionary referenced by most Macs and iPhones. It has it all: full sentences (“The team has been researching into flora and fauna”), short fragments and clauses (“a torrential downpour”), dialogue (“‘It’s OK, we’re not related,’ she joked”), insults (“You miserable old creep”), terminology from philosophy, botany, geology, zoology, music, and sports, and much more.
Second edition, 2014, HarperCollins Publishers
An attempt to find something in stark contrast to NOAD led me next to Collins’s Primary Learner’s Dictionary, a British volume intended for primary-school students age seven and above. Given the intended audience, the word list is simpler and more concise than those of other dictionaries, and its examples are generally short and simply constructed, although the content is often no less adult. I’m sure “She came into the room, almost completely nude” is indispensable in the classroom.
Revised third edition, 2001, The Macquarie Library Pty Ltd
The Macquarie Dictionary is generally considered to be the authoritative source on Australian English. Macquarie refers to its examples as “illustrative phrases,” and includes a wealth of region-specific vocabulary and thousands of diverse quotations from Australian writers. It also boasts a tremendous number of short fragments (“lost ships,” “for the time being,” “a sudden attack”), which proved useful when I was playing with the rhythm of stories.
Fourth edition, 2008, HarperCollins Publishers
I can’t believe I wasted so many hours as a young boy looking through regular dictionaries for dirty words when I could have picked up a slang dictionary and found enough filth to sink a battleship. In addition to obscenities, American Slang is loaded with forties and fifties colloquialisms that would be more at home in a pulpy gumshoe thriller, such as “You’re the dirty dog that snuffed my brother.”
1996, NTC Publishing Group
Problematic reading abounds in this volume, which boasts more filth and an embarrassment of best-ignored sexist, racist, and homophobic slurs. Avoid those, however, and you might be rewarded with something like the suspiciously P. G. Wodehouse–esque “You may call it a tumble in the hay, my dear. I call it adultery!”
1997, Houghton Mifflin Company
I found this dictionary in San Francisco’s own Mechanics’ Institute Library, and fell in love as soon as I found the sentence “Can he make a living as a freelance trumpeter?” Stories composed entirely of idioms are hard to write and miserable to read, so I generally dipped into this dictionary when stories required a little colloquial secret sauce.
Seventh edition, 2015, HarperCollins Publishers
With contemporary British English for young readers covered by Collins’s Primary Learner’s Dictionary, I knew I needed a modern adult volume to pair it with. Collins English Dictionary is a stout and densely packed edition with mercifully legible typesetting, and its examples seem to prize brevity above all else. Occasionally, though, it whips out a line like “The light percolating through the stained-glass windows cast colored patterns on the floor.*”
First edition, 1948, The Macmillan Company
The oldest dictionary referenced in this collection is a literary bird’s nest of quotations organized by theme, from “ability” to “zeal,” with choice words from Shakespeare, Byron, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, and more, compiled by American anthologist Burton Egbert Stevenson. (Go ahead and say his name out loud a few times. I’ll wait.) My copy is a handsome clothbound beast in a hard slipcase, with a smell that would set print fetishists quivering.
Fifth edition, 2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
A formidable—and wonderfully designed—dictionary, and the most recent referenced in this book, the American Heritage Dictionary shares New Oxford American’s sheer breadth of example constructions and specialized terminology—from astronomy to cartography, dance to Egyptology.
Eleventh edition, 2003, Merriam-Webster Inc.
An embarrassingly late addition to the roster, given that Merriam-Webster is the oldest dictionary publisher in the US and the Collegiate is perhaps the most popular desk dictionary in the country. Merriam-Webster’s approach to examples is remarkably buttoned-down, compared to that of many of the dictionaries in this list—they’re short and efficient, and have a distinct no-nonsense tone.
Third edition, 1989, Delair Publishing Company
Equal parts charming and creepy, My First Dictionary is an illustrated dictionary for the very young based on a list of 1,500 words taken from the New Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language. Its examples are slight, simple, and full of Bills, Toms, Janes, and Marys.
Fifth pocket edition, 2016, West Publishing Co.
An abridged version of the most widely used law dictionary in the United States. Examples are thin on the ground and written with a uniform courtroom formality, veering between dense jargon (“there is no need for intendment, the court reasoned, when the text of the statute is clear”) and strangely poignant fragments (“alienation of affections,” “solemnity of marriage”).
Please note: Every dictionary referenced in this book was compiled using its own unique style guide. Those guides dictate every formatting decision from hyphenation to capitalization, abbreviation, the treatment of names and numbers, and far beyond. To combine excerpts from all twelve of those dictionaries with no thought to unifying those formatting choices would leave these stories much worse for wear. Consequently, in addition to those edits mentioned in The Rules, further small edits have been made throughout this book in the interests of maintaining the publisher’s house style, and ensuring the best reading experience. Perhaps most notably—at least to this Englishman—UK spellings have been altered to their US counterparts. This pains me as much as it does you, British readers. Feel free to pencil all the missing u’s back in to “color” and “favor” as you see fit.