Why, the phone book, of course. Usually the yellow pages, if you were in a reasonably sized metropolis. Nobody used a dictionary; I can’t imagine where this misinformation came from.
The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were softbacks, so were more comfy to sit on than a hardback dictionary. Not to mention that not all households had a dictionary, while I seem to recall that the market penetration of landlines was something like 98% of American households (with subsidization for poorer folks) and they all had phone books; both were pretty much necessary to carry on a normal life.
Now, let me tell you about paper roadmaps, and how they were available for free at pretty much all gas stations (though the ones at Esso were considered the best), on a little rack near the door. No problem perusing the selection while your gas was pumped and oil checked by the attendants. (And there was no food or candy available to buy, so your other options for amusement were pretty limited).
We definitely used the phonebook in Miami. Between the white pages and mulitple yellow pages there was enough stack height for several kids. And my mom would've killed us if we sat on her books.
Speaking of road maps, my first real road trip, early 90s, I used a AAA TripTik. I’m glad not to need that anymore, but there’s still a place in the world for paper maps.
For the younger readers, phonebooks were the ad supported contact directories that preceded search engines. They were forcefully delivered to just about any address with a landline across the country (typicaly yearly, sometimes by multiple publishers). People found alternate uses for them.
Does anyone else still get phone books? I've never had a landline but still get one dropped off at my door annually in Denver. It goes straight to the recycling bin.
That's how Will Wright came up with the cheat codes for SimCity 2000, when he found the silliest names in the phone book of Mr. Porntips and Mr. Guzzardo.
Oh man, phone books. It's so weird that those are still delivered to possibly millions of households world wide. Why not save the environment a bit by asking to get off their delivery list?
I don't think it's possible to "get off their delivery list"; they just get dropped on the stoop/porch/entryway, one for each mailbox. It's not like they're ever addressed to anyone personally.
I recently tackled a book that was rather above my French reading level. It only took about half an hour spent fumbling with my Larousse before I plunked down $6 on their iOS app so that I could get back to reading my book. That weekend, my trusty old dictionary and I paid a visit to the used bookstore.
It's hard for me to imagine an information technology that's been more thoroughly superseded than the print dictionary. Electronic media make it faster to look words up in the first place, sure. But I also get audible pronunciations, and, if a definition includes another word I don't know, I can just tap on it to navigate to its definition. A print encyclopedia, you can at least sit down with a volume and just read it, and it's an experience that's sometimes more fun than surfing Wikipedia, by virtue of feeling a bit more random and serendipitous. But using a dictionary is always vaguely unpleasant; all you want to do is accomplish a specific task and then get back to your business.
The author is right. They really do derive most their value these days from being, in effect, large blocks of wood.
I've had the reverse impression over recent years: dictionary sites have become so bloated and unusable, between ads, comment systems, inefficient JS, and abysmal "mobile-friendly" pages I've gone back to my old hardcover whenever convenient. I imagine part of this is use-case, however: I tend to use a dictionary infrequently, mainly when I'm reading with the shelf within reach, so the overhead of launching an app or navigating to a website is a lot higher than practicing a second language, where you might keep the app open.
And of course it never lost its place as the canonical Scrabble-checker.
I use Wiktionary — no ads, comments, and it's fast.
My father had an "Official Scrabble Word List" book, which was just a list of words without definitions. An app would be even better for this: you could take a photo of the word, and it could give a simple yes/no without any chance of "accidentally" seeing other words.
Agreed that the sites aren't so good. I went with Larousse's app, which isn't perfect, but works well. Their website, on the other hand, is fairly painful to use.
Though, agreed with others that Wiktionary is good. It often offers higher-quality entries than the commercial ones, too.
I have a certain nostalgia for dictionaries as well. That is, until I actually end up having to use one nowadays. It one of these problems that modern technology has completely and utterly superseded. You can find people arguing for the superiority of analog audio or film cameras (if only for purely subjective or emotional reasons) but I wonder if you'll find many people who still go out of their ways to use a paper dictionary instead of one of the digital alternatives available. It's so much faster and convenient. You can also easily look up any slang word, archaism, proper noun etc...
I've been learning Portuguese lately and quite naturally, having grown up using dictionaries extensively, I bought a Portuguese dictionary. I end up not using it, I just look up on my smartphone instead. The main problem is not so much the lookup speed but the fact that a small pocket dictionary simply doesn't have enough words while large ones are way too bulky to use comfortably and carry around.
I suspect that for people learning languages with a more complex script (chinese comes to mind) modern technology make things a lot easier as well, I remember reading that looking up words in a Chinese dictionary could be quite complicated for a beginner.
A paper dictionary is nice when reading a paper book. I seem to have two "flows" in my brain, one for reading on paper and one for interacting with a computer screen. Looking up a word on the computer seems to break up one flow with the other, whereas I don't have the same problem flipping through a book.
This is also the case, at least for me, whenever I sit down to do some serious writing - a thesaurus/dictionary set is easy to glance into momentarily, while looking up a word on my phone completely disrupts my concentration and mindset.
I found the app "Pleco" invaluable when I was learning Mandarin. It does handwriting recognition (even with a beginner's scribbles), character "assembly" (put the bits together), transliteration, and an impressive OCR.
Once you have a character, "word" or sentence, it will give an English definition, male and female pronunciation, show the correct way to write the character in simplified (PRC) or traditional (HK, TW, SG etc) script, link to the component characters, and link to the characters to which it itself is a component. And give example sentences (with pronunciation).
The basic version is free, but it's one of the few Android apps I paid for.
> I suspect that for people learning languages with a more complex script (chinese comes to mind) modern technology make things a lot easier as well, I remember reading that looking up words in a Chinese dictionary could be quite complicated for a beginner.
It's honestly not that bad once you learn a little about recognizing the radicals [0] that make up each character. The way these dictionaries work, at least for Japanese, is that you first lookup the main radical, and then you just need the stroke count [1] of the second component. These radicals/components are reused often so once you learn how to write a few of them you can get decent at counting the strokes (a dictionary I perused actually recommends breaking the non-radical part into common components and just summing up their parts to count faster). This narrows it down pretty well and then you just have to visually search for the character.
There are also alternative methods that can be used such as that of Kodansha's Kanji Learner's Dictionary [1], which uses a three-number code, with the first being how the radical and its component are visually oriented, and the other two their respective stroke counts. I've also learned the four corner method, [2] and while it can seem deceptively simple, it's also remarkably unintuitive in what part of the kanji is considered a corner (and also relies on a specific writing of the kanji).
Of course modern technology does make it a tad easier, especially for those who have no clue about things like radicals. The online dictionary Jisho [3] for example lets you search by radicals where you can select each radical—even a sub-component—regardless of position, and it'll just give you a set of kanji containing those radicals, ordered by total stroke count. You can also draw the kanji, but in my experience this works very sub-optimally, and still depends on using the right number of the ever-important stroke count. I own a denshi jisho [4] which lets you draw the kanji with a stylus, and that works a lot better.
[4]: Literally "electronic dictionary", they're veritable beasts, and contain not only multiple Japanese dictionaries, they also have specialized dictionaries (like business), J-E and E-J dictionaries, pronunciation dictionaries with audio, encyclopedias, other multilingual phrasebooks, practice for the TOEIC, and so many more that are too numerous to list.
Am I the only one here that still makes my kids look up words in dictionary? We have all the e-devices but I think there's something worthwhile about re-enforcing alphabet order in words, learning by wandering or happens upon words nearby in paper dictionary. The kids also have to sound out the words to try to find it so they learn different word-sound patterns. All this skills are practiced each time they do a quick dictionary lookup.
It's useful to learn things the hard way, but then move on at some point once internalized. I remember as a teen avoiding the drudgery of the dictionary and it affected my vocabulary for a decade+, until I got onto the internet.
So I decided to go on dictionary.com. Here's what I see on the front page:
-We asked "What is the state of the USA in five words? The responses are not what we imagined."
-Can you translate these famous quotes from emoji?
- How is pansexuality different from bisexuality?
- Epic Fail. (seriously, the article is titled this.)
- When a cat is so cute you want to bite its face? (sic) There's a word for that!
Those are some of the articles on the front page. Clickbait, on a dictionary. Then you start to wonder why you are trusting it when it needs to monetize with clickbait.
> Online dictionaries are likely to be backed by, well, a dictionary, which allows for O(1) look-ups.
I think that this is true only under simplifying assumptions of a sort that would also allow one to claim that dictionary look ups are O(1) (with constant equal to the size of the dictionary).
I was very glad I still had my printed dictionaries that day they digged the cables over by accident. I'm not going to loose a large part of my functional literacy, just because the power/internet goes out.
Even if it only happened one time for the rest of my life, it would be worth the 20cm of shelf space it claimed.
> I'm not going to loose a large part of my functional literacy, just because the power/internet goes out.
Is your functional literacy really so dictionary-bound that a temporary outage makes you lose a large part of it? (Maybe it is! But I think that, for most people, referring to a dictionary, online or in print, is an occasional act.)
I would say that any persons functional literacy will be enhanced with access to a dictionary (digital or printed), unless they can the dictionary by heart. I wouldn't called that bound. I would just call it putting in your best effort.
I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of text. Most people don't do that, but they should.
> I would say that any persons functional literacy will be enhanced with access to a dictionary (digital or printed), unless they can the dictionary by heart.
I agree! (Further it is impossible to know a good dictionary by heart, since it should be updated regularly.) I didn't mean to suggest that normal people don't need dictionaries, only that it seems a bit extreme to suggest that a large part of functional literacy (not just fluency or eloquence) would be lost by a temporary loss of access to one.
> I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of text. Most people don't do that, but they should.
Just this one time, I hope that it is OK for me to nit-pick and point out that you almost certainly mean 'consult', not 'confer'.
>I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of text. Most people don't do that, but they should.
I do sometimes check spelling when my word processor hasn't figured it out for me. But I can't say that I'm normally particularly uncertain about the meaning of the vast majority of words I use.
Ever so often I check a word to verify that it really does have the precise meaning I think it does. But I can't say doing so is at all common. I'm exposed to a lot of bad writing but the problems are more around structure and logic. Incorrect vocabulary usually isn't a big problem in my experience.
Computers these days have multiple megabytes of storage capacity and can easily fit a dictionary into their hard disk drives. So you don't need to worry about loss of network connectivity.
Printed dictionaries had one advantage that hasn't been superseded by the web: They didn't try to deliberately give false information. I've noticed that some dictionary sites give entries for words that are spelt incorrectly. And I don't mean British vs American spelling or words whose spelling is in flux. I mean flat out wrong. I presume they do this to get more hits from people searching for the wrong word. And no, they don't always tell you it's wrong. (I'll see if I can find an example and update my message.)
Another irritation is that you can find support for any possible meaning of a word or phrase if look around -- with sites like urbandictionary.com all it takes is 1 person to invent a meaning and if you're not careful, you'd think that it's an accepted usage. It takes way more work now to be sure of any result.
> Printed dictionaries had one advantage that hasn't been superseded by the web: They didn't try to deliberately give false information. I've noticed that some dictionary sites give entries for words that are spelt incorrectly. And I don't mean British vs American spelling or words whose spelling is in flux. I mean flat out wrong. I presume the do this to get more hits.
I keep a dictionary and thesaurus. They're actually pretty useful when you need to think of names for projects. I personally haven't found an electronic dictionary that lets you 'browse' as well as a physical one, but if anyone knows of one I'd like to check it out.
Of course I haven't used (and for that matter not sure I've seen) a white pages in years. But yellow pages can still be somewhat useful for finding local services of various types. A lot of local service businesses are still pretty bad about online presences.
Yellow Pages may have been good for finding local services of various types, but it was also useful for retrieving the entire password database for offline inspection. Sun eventually improved their online presence and security, and renamed Yellow Pages to Network Information Services after losing a lawsuit by British Telecom.
In the United States it’s still a law in many states that landline providers are required to provide a printed white pages, which they subsidize with yellow pages (ads). It’s a legal anachronism.
I've not seen a phone book since moving to Norway, and just realized it after reading your comment. In the states, I'd get at least one every year - sometimes two - and it didn't matter if I wanted one or not. I honestly think they print them because businesses pay to be in them.
>I honestly think they print them because businesses pay to be in them
Well, sure. That's what the yellow pages basically are--advertising for local businesses. (There may be some level of listing that's free. I don't know.) As other have noted, my local yellow pages is pretty small and thin these days though with the caveat that I don't live in a city. I suspect that a listing/ad is no longer quite the requirement for local businesses that it once was.
This whole article is offensive to my personal sensibilities. I suspect this is because (not that I'm as fancy as the author) I have at least a smidgen or shadow of taste, so not being able to ostentatiously display how dignified and fancy I am with a useless tome I would never reference isn't a terrifying prospect. I'll just have to develop other empty, meaningless ways to impress people, like having my think piece inexplicably hosted at neh.gov.
Most other comments here answer the question in the headline. The actual body of the article is an utterly ponderous exploration of dictionaries as signalling, to which I directly respond. If anything, my comment is perhaps the most on topic.
The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were softbacks, so were more comfy to sit on than a hardback dictionary. Not to mention that not all households had a dictionary, while I seem to recall that the market penetration of landlines was something like 98% of American households (with subsidization for poorer folks) and they all had phone books; both were pretty much necessary to carry on a normal life.
Now, let me tell you about paper roadmaps, and how they were available for free at pretty much all gas stations (though the ones at Esso were considered the best), on a little rack near the door. No problem perusing the selection while your gas was pumped and oil checked by the attendants. (And there was no food or candy available to buy, so your other options for amusement were pretty limited).