The Student`s Most Important Book: The Dictionary

You may think The Oxford English Dictionary is not a book an experienced student of the English Language and Literature may take the trouble to carry around with them, especially with the easy access to spellchecker and thesaurus software in word processors. "I`m not learning the language," you might think, "this isn`t French class, I already speak English avec facilité!" If I may so bold as to suggest how wrong you are in these assumptions. I would suggest that the dictionary was one of the most important tools in my work as a student and always featured in my bibliographies. We, as students, are all learning the language and its nuanced meanings all the time. English is one of the most complicated European languages, being a composite of multiple different sources; Norse, French, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Saxon, German all end up in English language which has more than twice as many words as French. In learning and using a new meaning of a word, we reinvent a word again and again and open up its previous uses to a reader who is willing to see its rich history. Shakespeare alone was responsible for inventing thousands of words we take for granted now and hundreds of everyday phrases which often had a specific use in a play. Sometimes they have a direct original meaning that is quite different form its colloquial use today.

Although spellchecker speeds up the writing (or rather the typing process) of doing your homework and composing an essay and of course it`s weightless unlike a large volume, it is a very poor substitute for the OED itself. What a proper dictionary offers you is the entire history and etymology of the words you use, their varying use across time and the different definitions, clauses and functions of that word. The OED can even if you understand phonetics, tells you how to pronounce a word correctly, which even professional lectures in universities sometimes get wrong. While the word you are reaching for while writing, for example a complicated word or Greek or Latin origin like "etymology," may be on the tip of your tongue and you may make a stab at it and let the spellchecker do the rest, the only way know that it is precisely means is to look it up. Another very good example is an everyday word that you thought you knew the exact meaning of; "sad." Sad doesn`t just mean upset or unhappy, its original Anglo-Saxon use was much closer to "serious."

At the higher levels of English literature study, where the exact meaning of a writer`s words may be interpreted very differently by different people or schools of thought, it helps to know the precise definition of the words they are using. This puts you at a high advantage over pupils who just accept the status quo of the text the read without question. There is always a practical use for furthering our understanding of language and its complications, although it may not be apparent at first. It always helps to look up a word`s proper place in our language. So; check whether your school has subscribed to the OED online or just buy a concise Oxford English Dictionary for your study desk and keep it close at hand.