Susie Dent Quotes

I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.

I've been obsessed with words since I was a little girl, and I am fortunate that each week as resident word expert on 'Countdown' I am ideally placed to quiz my guests in dictionary corner about the words and phrases they use.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.

There are about 30 words around you all the time, like 'thread' or 'exit.'

When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

I still can't spell anything, but I can bust out two-dollar words.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Without computers, in the 17th century, we could classify the entire animal kingdom... there was this idea of the speciation, right? And now, all a search engine is is essentially the mathematical speciation of ideas - and these things really derive from the way that language is used and the way words relate.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me.

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

I'm a massive fan of the dictionary.

One of the joys of language is its constant evolution, and a lexicographer's job is both to track new words and to reassess those from the past.

When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the "Agamemnon."

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.

Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

The biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, andy more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages.

What disturbs or assures us about race has very little to do with blood or biology. Race is about how you use language, understand your heritage, interpret your history, identify with your kin, figure out what your meaning and worth to a society that places values on you beyond your control. And it's also about what people see you as - or take you to be.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.

I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room--a complete mess--so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.