Best 108 quotes in «dictionary quotes» category

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

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.

I want to preach the gospel so plainly that men can come from the factories and not have to bring along a dictionary.

My erotic poetry is not poetry that uses vernacular words. It is a very erotic poetry, but I never use anything, for example, that is not in the dictionary. I don't like to be ugly, I seek out what is beautiful, and if my great search is for freedom and beauty, I can't be vulgar, ordinary.

Justice is a word that resides in the dictionary. It occasionally makes its escape, but is promptly caught and put back where it belongs.

Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.

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

Success brings poise, especially avoirdupois. Success comes before work only in the dictionary.

My lad chewed and swallowed a dictionary. We gave him Epsom salts - but we can't get a word out of him.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.

Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation.

The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around.

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

The first definition of gross negligence that comes up when you take out the legal dictionary is being extremely careless. The minute you say someone is extremely careless you are saying they're grossly negligent.

The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries.

There was no word in the dictionary adequate to describe the sensation other than sensational.

There's a measure of prescriptivism and descriptivism in every dictionary. Prescriptivism believes that the language should mirror the best practices of English, and editors are prescriptivist in so far as they don't want to let things they consider to be inelegant or ungrammatical into print.

There is a breed of fashion models who weigh no more than an abridged dictionary.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

What's a depression? The dictionary says a depression is a dent. And what's a dent? Everybody knows a dent is a hole. And what's a hole? You tell me what's a hole! And I'll tell you that a hole is nothin'!

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

Weird itself, even in the dictionary, is just something that is different and unexplainable. A weirdo is someone who follows their heart. Im definitely weird, aint nothing wrong with that.

To make dictionaries is dull work.

We are becoming so accustomed to millions and billions of dollars that 'thousands' has almost passed out of the dictionary.

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.

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

Who is to say who is the villain and who is the hero? Probably the dictionary.

When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary, there's a picture of you.

You'll find sympathy in the dictionary between sh*t and suicide.

You evidently do not suffer from "quotation-hunger" as I do! I get all the dictionaries of quotations I can meet with, as I always want to know where a quotation comes from.

A good dictionary can only help.

About 35-40% of the time, a player wants to create a word ending in a specific letter. This, however, is not the way we traditionally think, and, not to mention, this is not the way dictionaries are sorted. In other words, in many situations, conventional dictionaries are not arranged in an easy to use manner. This dictionary solves that problem by sorting on the last letter of the word.

A dictionary of all the words we did not say.

Aleister Crowley once stated that the most important grimoire, or book of magical instruction, that anyone could ever conceivably own would be an etymological dictionary, and in my opinion he was exactly right. I keep it right here by my desk, and just 10 minutes ago it confirmed for me that I had the spelling of “proprioception” right all along, even though my spell-checker had raised a crinkly red eyebrow.

If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.

A single act is worth a thousand thoughts

suffuse, v. I don’t like it when you use my shampoo, because then your hair smells like me, not you.

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 difference you might think. And neither, would you say, is necessarily more correct than the other? But now look up each of the words comprising each definition, and then the definitions of those definitions, and so on. Some still may only differ slightly, while others may differ quite a lot. Yet any discrepancy, large or small, only compounds that initial difference further and further, pushing each 'definition' farther apart. How similar are they then at the end of this process...assuming it ever would end? Could we possibly even be referring to the same word by this point? And we still haven't considered what Collins here...or Gage, or Funk and Wagnalls might have to say about it. Off on enough tangents and you're eventually led completely off track. ML: Or around in circles. FV: Precisely! ML: Oxford, though, is generally considered the authority, isn't it? FV: Well, it's certainly the biggest...the most complete. But then, that truly is your vicious circle - every word defined...every word in every definition defined...around and around in an infinite loop. Truly a book that never ends. A concise or abridged dictionary may, at least, have an out... ML: I wonder, then, what the smallest possible "complete dictionary" would be? Completely self-contained, that is, with every word in every definition accounted for. How many would that be, do you suppose? Or, I guess more importantly, which ones? FV: Well, that brings to mind another problem. You know that Russell riddle about naming numbers?

How come "burbled" gets to be in the Oxford English Dictionary but "tulgy" doesn't? Hm?

I don't understand your book. Isn't every book a book of words?

If it's any consolation, Princess, I think he's a supercilious, salacious sap." "You've been reading the dictionary!" "My only hope of comprehending your conversation, my petite sesquipedalian.

As I make my way through, I feel okayness reaching through me. The funny thing is that okayness is not a real word. It's not in the dictionary. But it's in me.

breathtaking, adj. Those mornings when we kiss and surrender for an hour before we say a single word.

Home means always here...

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use. The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.