Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them. What do you look for in a dictionary, after all? Lucid definitions? The citations that examplify usage? Etymologies? Spellings? Or do you, like Hardy, simply seek assurance that the word exists? I strongly suspect that the warrant of the lexicon is one of the writer's deep securities; no one feels really confident about using an unattested word.

LRB 5 March 1987 | PDF Download