The Oxford English

I’ve been guilty of having left my dictionary of choice sitting stranded on a high shelf for several years. I can’t actually remember why I went to get it down today, but I know for sure it won’t be going back. I’ve already filled the hole it left and found a new place for it besides where I work in my writer’s den of a bedroom.

I’ve become lazy. If I need to check out a word, I use the internet. It’s so ridiculously easy that it’s now become a reflex action. A definition appears instantaneously. But I’ve just been reminded how that’s a completely different experience to looking up a word in a good dictionary, especially one as beautifully designed and as extensive as this one. My edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English comes in at 2,152 pages and is a wonder of typography. Aside from being definitive—which goes without saying—it promotes discovery.

Looking up a specific word I have to approximate the right place to open up the book. I need to look at random words to identify where I am and decide whether to flick forwards or backwards. Being forced to find my bearings in this way means that my eye alights on a random word that may or may not be familiar. Either way, my curiosity is invariably hooked and I’m reading about it.

Seeking a definition for a word takes me on a journey that opens my mind to possibility. It opens a door to serendipity. Even when I find the right page and land on the word I’m after, it’s hard to resist having my eye drawn up and down and across the columns, my attention lured by other surrounding entries. This is the joy of using a physical dictionary as opposed to a digital one. I always learn something new. I’m ashamed to admit that I’d lost sight of that.

Musing about this today got me thinking about how the internet is failing us in this respect. It’s like having a dictionary the size of a city, so big that it’s impossible to browse its billions of pages without help. We have to rely on search tools and algorithms that learn our tastes and proclivities and work to stop us wandering too far away from what we already know. As the wealth of content on the internet continues to expand, so our view on it contracts. It’s like looking out on the universe with a microscope.

It’s not too difficult to plot a journey of random discovery on the internet, just as it was never that difficult for me to go into the next room and reach up for my big dictionary. I’d developed a habit of mind such that I never bothered. And that’s the issue. Search engines and social media sites do nothing to encourage us to go on internet adventures. There’s a whole world of stuff out there but it’s like we mostly never go further than our own little block.