I often consult it during evening games of Scrabble or midday magazine-reading. I keep it open, solitary on a tabletop, the way dictionaries are usually found in libraries. Its 3,000 pages (India paper, with a marbled fore edge) are punctuated by a thumb index. I prize my 1954 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, which I picked up on the street near my apartment in Brooklyn a few years ago. Looking up words encountered in the wild felt less like a failing than like an admission that there are lots of things I don’t know and an opportunity to discover just how many. I started to see dictionaries, inexact as they are, as field guides to the life of language. A sense of curiosity, rather than desperate completism, steered me. It wasn’t until after I graduated from college, and subsequently realized that there’s no such thing as all-encompassing knowledge, that I was able to read for pleasure. Understanding the nuances of language seemed like an obstacle to that goal. At some age, I assumed, I would need to know everything. Like most young people, I enjoyed learning but thought of it as something I would eventually be done with. But I do remember feeling a little betrayed by the idea that there was a whole layer of language that couldn’t quite be conveyed through a dictionary. I can’t remember how old I was when I first learned the words denotation (the definition of a word) and connotation (the suggestion of a word).
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