Word Meanings Quotes

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

A dictionary is merely the universe arranged in alphabetical order.

Perhaps like the many and various meanings of the word "we," liberals use the word "unsubstantiated" to mean "tested repeatedly and proved true."

Dictionary - opinion expressed as truth in alphabetical order.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

[Instead of collecting stamps, he collected dictionaries and encyclopaedias:] Because you can learn more from them.

So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.

There are so many who know more than I do, who understand the world better than I do. I would be truly learned, a great scholar, if only I could retain everything I've learned from those I have known. But then would I still be me? And isn't all that only words? Words grow old, too; they change their meaning and their usage. They get sick just as we do; they die of their wounds and then they are relegated to the dust of dictionaries. And where am I in all this?

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.

The point,' Ms. Conyers continued, "is that no word had one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life.

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.