Views from campus

I use a dictionary to learn new words or unfamiliar expressions. We use a dictionary at home when we are playing games, particularly when we are playing Scrabble. We use it to check if words exist so especially those little two-letter words that are very useful on the Scrabble board and sometimes we use it for crosswords as well if we are trying to fit a word into its particular space. Well English is a capricious language in terms of pronunciation and orthography. I usually need to resort to my dictionary to solve a problem. I use a dictionary mostly to check word spellings but sometimes to check where words come from, the etymology.

I use a dictionary to look up the meanings of words that I don’t know and also to find out more about the origins of some of the words that I do know. So in the past few years I’ve become particularly interested in the Oxford Word of the Year as a way of demonstrating the connection between social reality and communication in digital media. I use a dictionary when I am confused especially to look for the meanings of words which are unfamiliar. To clarify the word I’m looking for and to find out other meanings of the same word and I use online dictionary more often than hard copies because hard copies are not very up-to-date.

Primarily I use a dictionary to look up phrases in foreign languages, words and phrases in languages that I am not familiar with but also I find that I have to look up words that I think might be misspellings but in fact might have actually become real words. I use a dictionary for example now if I don’t understand a word that I haven’t seen before or heard before and also I use a dictionary to try and understand the meaning of that word that I have heard.