Dictionary in sentence

132 examples of Dictionary in a sentence

I think most people, when they say a word isn't real, what they mean is, it doesn't appear in a standard dictionary.

I do, however, collect new words much the way dictionary editors do, and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this "research."

But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don't yet appear in a dictionary?

I'm going to do this as a show of hands: How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary, either print or online?

Again, a show of hands: How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using?

Just think about the phrase "Look it up in the dictionary," which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same.

Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers.

Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors, and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out.

I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express concern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary, including "LOL" when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and "defriend" when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary.

Now, it's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language.

To show you what I mean, we'll look at an example, but before we do, I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note.

I hope that what you can do is find language change not worrisome but fun and fascinating, just the way dictionary editors do.

So how does a word get into a dictionary?

It gets in because we use it and we keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to us.

If you're thinking, "But that lets all of us decide what words mean," I would say, "Yes it does, and it always has." Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource, but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean.

But then they changed things, and at the end of 2009, they announced that we were going to have a new policy, and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, you couldn't use the same character more than three times, and it wasn't allowed to be in a dictionary.

In one condition, the computer picked from a dictionary of the very common words in the English language, and so you'd get pass phrases like "try there three come."

I came to the United States 13 years ago, and to this day I have to ask, "What does that mean?" So, this morning I went to see on the dictionary and it said that there was this gentleman that was not branding its cattle.

So Webster's dictionary defines the word "awesome" as fear mingled with admiration or reverence, a feeling produced by something majestic.

And my job as a lexicographer is to try to put all the words possible into the dictionary.

Go ahead, start making words today, send them to me, and I will put them in my online dictionary, Wordnik.

I'm using clamps and ropes and all sorts of materials, weights, in order to hold things in place before I varnish so that I can push the form before I begin, so that something like this can become a piece like this, which is just made from a single dictionary.

You can flip through a dictionary and choose words at random.

I made this diagram to remember all the two- and three-letter words in the official Scrabble dictionary.

And I took a dictionary and I ripped it up, and I made it into a sort of Agnes Martin grid, and I poured resin all over it and a bee got stuck.

Instead, the opposite happened: It sort of created a magnification, like a magnifying glass, on the dictionary text.

Together, they form a fun pocket book with the 29 Arabic letters and the four different forms, plus a 400-word dictionary.

How is it that phrases that are considered just about synonymous by the dictionary can evoke such different pictures and feelings?

I started developing digital book technologies, such as a digital Braille editor, digital Braille dictionary and a digital Braille library network.

The short answer is that no one wants to watch a starship crew spend years compiling an alien dictionary.

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