If you are writing, you owe it to yourself to read this blog post from 2014 about a dictionary: You’re probably using the wrong dictionary. It’s so beautiful! It brings tears to my eyes.
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
Did you see that last clause? “To shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew.” I’m not sure why you won’t find writing like that in dictionaries these days, but you won’t.
They’re talking about Webster’s *An American Dictionary of the English Language* and using examples from the 1913 edition which appears to be much better than all modern dictionaries.
What I mean is that with its blunt authority the New Oxford definition of “pathos” — “a quality that evokes pity or sadness” — shuts down the conversation, it shuts down your thinking about the word, while the Webster’s version gets your wheels turning: it seems so much more provisional — “that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality; as, the pathos of a picture, of a poem, or of a cry” — and therefore alive.
It also has instructions on how to install it on a Mac. I guess I want it installed on my phone? I installed the *Webster’s 1913* app on my phone.
#Writing
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That was a beautiful read. I wonder if there is such a dictionary in Spanish.
– Enzo 2019-01-30 06:42 UTC
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Or in German! There’s *Duden* and *Bertelsmann* and neither registered as “beautiful.”
– Alex Schroeder 2019-01-30 07:14 UTC
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Anyway, if your system has a package manager, I recommend dict (a command line client) and dictd (a server that runs locally) and a ton of dictionaries, one of them being Webster 1913. It’s great because there is also dict integration with editors (Emacs), and many language dictionaries (in all the directions).
I love the entire system.
– Alex 2021-11-01 12:48 UTC
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@lucidiot adds:
you can try the dictionaries out without installing anything on https://dict.org
Fantastic!
– Alex 2021-11-01 16:44 UTC
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@epoch has this shell script to add which you would run from inetd:
you can edit this script and serve whatever data you want as “definitions” for “words”. I’m using dict for lightweight word translation, and urban dictionary scraping through my own dict server. – shell-daemons: dictd
– Alex 2021-11-01 21:29 UTC