Are Dictionaries Obsolete in Age of Google?

Description

Do we still need dictionaries in the age of Google?

Dictionaries are, after all, giant databases of words compiled by lexicographers who investigate word usages and meanings.

These days, however, Google is our database of meaning. Want to know how to spell assiduous? Type it incorrectly and Google will reply , in its kind-hearted way: "Did you mean: assiduous"? Why yes, Google, I did.

Google then spits out a bunch of links to Web definitions for assiduous . Without clicking on any of them, the two-sentence summaries below each link give me enough to get a sense of the word: "hard working," and "diligent."

Still not satisfied? Fine, click on the Google "News" tab – and you will be directed to a page of links where the word assiduous appears in news stories. Presto, sample sentences and usage examples.

"You and I can be our own lexicographers now," says Barbara Wallraff, the longtime language columnist for The Atlantic magazine. "We don't need dictionaries."

Of course, there is plenty that dictionaries still do well. Online dictionaries provide most of the definition links that pop up in Google. Dictionaries are still good for obscure usages and etymologies. Dictionaries also can arbitrate disputes that arise during a game of Scrabble or late-night conversations.

But dictionaries have also failed us in many ways. They infuriate word sticklers by presenting a variety of usages and leaving the reader to decide which is correct. Dictionaries fail to update meanings often enough. And due to space constraints in the print editions, many dictionary definitions are so concise as to be unhelpful. Ever run into a definition like this one for calumnious: "of, involving, or using calumny"?

Few dictionaries – other than the vaunted Oxford English Dictionary – ...

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