• 8 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle



















  • There are some common misconceptions about dictionary definitions, including 1) that they’re prescriptive and 2) that they’re complete. In reality, at least for English, dictionaries are descriptive, meaning they attempt to describe how words are commonly used (where “commonly used” is a non-exact metric whose meaning is decided by the group compiling the dictionary); and they’re incomplete in a number of ways. A dictionary provides a starting point for understanding words we don’t know or are unfamiliar with, but there’s a reason people go to school for years to study specific subjects in depth–a depth that’s lacking in the dictionary definition.