Dictionary Limitations Quotes

A dictionary can embrace only a small part of the vast tapestry of a language.

I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary.

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

The trouble with the dictionary is that you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up to see how it is spelled.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

When I start asking my friends, "What do you think this means?" And it leads to way more interesting conversations than what it actually ends up meaning in the dictionary. Like "apocryphal," for instance.

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic