Tugs used to think that everyone’s name was in the dictionary, and when she had realized it was only hers, both Tugs and Button, she felt suddenly fond and possessive of it, as if this...

Wake up to think of words… want to walk through pages of meanings, the links in assonance, alliteration, or just simple sense that moves the eye to leap that way to the next-door play of...

I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what...

The right words to express oneself can never be found in any dictionary.

FV: Annandale defines ‘definition’ as “an explanation of the signification of a term.” Yet Oxford, on the other hand, defines it as “a statement of the precise meaning of a word.” A small, perhaps negligible...

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.