Tinotopia

I don’t keep a dictionary by my side as I read things, nor do I know anyone who does. I have no idea who Levenger et al. are selling these ‘reader’s totes’ to, with room for a dictionary and a magnifying glass and so on: morons, presumably.

With the Kindle, though, and the ability to look up words just by pushing a button, I find myself doing it a lot more often. Last night, for instance, I came across the word uxoriousness. Now, I know that uxor means wife — my knowledge of Latin and French is why I don’t need a dictionary — but just because you know the root doesn’t mean that you are familiar with all the connotations in English. Wifeousness? The context — this was in Martin Amis’ The Information — was that ‘uxoriousness’ was being held up by one of the characters as a virtue.

The dictionary has uxorious as ‘excessively fond of or submissive to a wife’. So his consideration that being ‘excessively’ fond of his wife is a virtue is an important clue to the nature of his character. Kindle dictionary FTW!

So. Great. It would be nice to just be able to press Alt-L while on a line to look up the words rather than having to navigate through another menu, but as my finger is on the scroll wheel anyway, what the heck.

However, the dictionary that comes with the Kindle is, like many dictionaries, sorely lacking. I cannot think of any specific examples at the moment, but about half of the words I’ve attempted to look up haven’t been there. I have a large vocabulary, and so the words I’m going to attempt to look up are going to tend to all be fairly obscure or archaic ones; but then you’d think that in assembling a dictionary for such a purpose, you’d take that into account. You wouldn’t include a definition for dog, for instance, or cat, using that space instead for the kinds of words that people who spend $400 on a reading device are more likely to be unfamiliar with.

Ay, there’s the rub: the dictionary wasn’t compiled for this purpose. It’s just a regular dictionary, with its composition not taking into account its intended use or audience.

It would be nice to see a dictionary for the Kindle — you can add your own, which the system will use when doing these lookups — that combined a standard dictionary-for-the-educated, the Urban Dictionary, a sci-fi dictionary, a Gazetteer, etc., etc., etc.

To the best of my knowledge, though, all these e-book dictionaries are just regular dictionaries with only the format, and not the content, adapted.