Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your writing better? Before the reign of digital tools, you’d probably have turned to a dictionary for the same assistance. Our parents and grandparents picked up a heavy book and looked up what words meant, how they’re used, maybe glanced at their etymology — and then made a linguistic choice, however shaky or idiosyncratic, to express their ideas.
In today’s universe of spell-check, autocorrect and artificial intelligence — each of which is capable of making those choices for us — why should we keep producing and owning actual, cinder-block-sized dictionaries? Because dictionaries enable us to write not with fail-safe convenience but with originality and a point of view. While AI assistants manufacture phrases and statements so writers don’t have to think them up, dictionaries provide us with the knowledge to use language ourselves in expressive and potentially infinite ways. They place choice — and authority — literally in human hands, forcing us to discover how we want to explain ourselves and our ideas to the world.
Dictionaries aren’t merely long lists of words and meanings; they’re also instructions for how best to use those words. Since the debuts of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, English dictionaries have reflected the language of particular populations — the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster don’t quite say the same things. Simultaneously, by codifying the meanings, uses and connotations of words, those same dictionaries have shaped language. Lexicographers look to the public to determine words’ meanings, and we in turn look to lexicographers to verify that our understanding of words is shared and mutually understood. The parameters of English are formed both top-down and bottom-up. Dictionaries amalgamate and standardise these two linguistic influences and, in doing so, define our most fundamental cultural medium.
Standard English doesn’t exist today the way it did as recently as the late 20th century. Thanks to the colloquial tone of ubiquitous internet-based communication, formal English has become essentially absent from most people’s lives. Where my parents’ letters to friends and colleagues would have adopted genial but brittle tones and structures, the vast majority of my social and professional correspondence is informal. Smartphone messaging conventions — like using exclamation points to indicate pleasant normalcy and ellipses to evoke impatience or indifference — routinely seep into follow-ups from artists and lawyers alike. It’s almost as if the more informal one’s writing is, the more capable, authoritative and trustworthy it reads.
The profusion of digital writing assistants like Grammarly and Microsoft Editor gives greater urgency to debates about what a dictionary should be. In 1946, George Orwell described good writing as “picking out words for the sake of their meaning”, a practice that dictionaries catalyse and writing programs stifle. Writers consulting a dictionary make a choice — writers guided by an app like Grammarly have their choices made for them.
Grammarly brags that its users can “rewrite full sentences with a click”, while Orwell notes that “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them”. It’s a fight between robotic consistency and human creativity. The digital-native approach delivers hands-off, derivative communication. The analog approach requires leafing through pages without knowing exactly where you’ll end up. One cedes the conviction of writing to a machine. The other bestows the crucible of thinking critically about what and how to write solely on an imperfect writer. Without dictionaries to provide us with a manual guide to English’s potential, writing that way is nearly impossible.
Web dictionaries like Wiktionary and Google Dictionary — whose contents are often derived from existing works by actual lexicographers and resources such as Google’s Ngrams — empower writers to some degree, but they can be lexicographically lax. I’m not convinced, for instance, that listing “amazeballs” as a synonym for “astonishing” helps clarify the scope and potency of the English language. Codifying English as it is spoken requires not just itemising neologisms but making deliberate choices. It’s traditional dictionaries’ human scrutiny and advocacy that make them catalysts for exploration rather than aggregators of information.
Our ability to express ourselves is critical — it helps us define our culture and our being. Dictionaries aid us in achieving this: They catalog our unique ways of thinking through language. I’m a Canadian; my feeling of pride and belonging in my native land is elevated by small linguistic Canadianisms (not many Americans say “eaves trough” or “serviette” — nor do AI chatbots, for the most part).
The new Canadian English Dictionary — still a work in progress, it will be the first of its kind in over two decades — is a critical part of constructing that identity. It takes a novel stance on describing the usage and orthography, or spelling, of particularly Canadian words — especially those derived from Canada’s mosaic of Indigenous and immigrant cultures. This approach privileges not the popularity but the heterogeneity of words, and it is equally descriptive and prescriptive, teaching a word’s origins and suggesting a better future for it at once. It’s a choice — like the choices we make when we use a word in our writing.
As digital writing — AI-generated, spell-checked, its words suggested for us — extends deeper into our lives and minds, we need dictionaries more than ever, not to write efficiently or correctly, but to cultivate relationships with the words we use. Abandoning dictionaries and embracing mechanised writing would erode our capacity for collective identity quite as much as the ability to express ourselves. We need these books on our shelves to flip through, animate, and surprise ourselves with. Without the impetus for self-expression and lifelong learning, we have to ask ourselves, why write at all?
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