Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages is one man’s account of reading the Oxford English Dictionary, cover to cover. This isn’t a review, because I haven’t read the book, but I was amused to read in the most recent New York Times Book Review that the author, Ammon Shea, owns about a thousand dictionaries!

I thought that was pretty crazy until I took a look at the dictionaries on my shelves. There’s the American Heritage Dictionary that I received when I graduated from high school, and the Compact Oxford English Dictionary next door in my husband’s office, acquired long ago through the Book of the Month club and which comes with a magnifying glass and, over the years, requires increasingly better light to read. But then I also have The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang; the Dictionary of Historical Terms; In a Pig’s Eye: The Dictionary of Country Jawing; The Writer’s Digest Flip Dictionary; Dorling Kindersley's Ultimate Visual Dictionary; Le Mot Juste: A Dictionary of Classical and Foreign Words and Phrases; The Dictionary of Eponyms: Names That Became Words; The Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage: A Guide to Nondiscriminatory Language; The Dictionary of Confusable Words; A Dictionary of Geography; The Describer’s Dictionary; Webster’s Medical Dictionary; Concise Science Dictionary; A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations; Webster’s New World Crossword Puzzle Dictionary; and of course Ambrose Bierce’s biting The Devil’s Dictionary (“Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.”).

And those are only the books with the word “dictionary” in the title. The Children’s Writer’s Word Book and J.I. Rodale’s The Synonym Finder (much better than Roget’s Thesaurus, in my opinion) are among some of my other favorite word books.

I’d be the first to admit that writers do not need one thousand, or even eighteen, dictionaries on their shelves to succeed. But dictionaries and thesauri (yes, I had to look up the plural of thesaurus) can be wonderful prompts for creative writing. In The Observation Deck: A Tool Kit for Writers, Naomi Epel tells the story of how a thesaurus helped Jack Prelutsky write one of the poems for his book Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast. I guess it’s only natural that when you’re writing about dinosaurs, you begin to look for different ways to say “huge.” His thesaurus featured seven synonyms that Prelutsky realized could be arranged to make a poem. I don’t want to violate copyright law by reprinting the entire poem, but it begins like this: “Seismosaurus was enormous/ Seismosaurus was tremendous/ Seismosaurus was prodigious/ Seismosaurus was stupendous.”

The thing is, the English language provides writers with a rich toolbox. So here’s a little challenge for today. Open up a dictionary or thesaurus—just about any page will do—and find a word that strikes your fancy. Play around with it, riff on it, write a poem, paragraph or—what the heck!—an entire story. My word? Marigold, which, according to the OED, is named after the Virgin Mary and the color gold.

Feel free to share your wordplay in the comments! Oh, and let me know if you have a favorite word book. I can see my Amazon wish list growing now.

Sara Latta
Champaign, Illinois
http://www.saralatta.com
I've got blisters on my fingers!