I just thought I’d post something here which has been on my mind for a while, and hopefully contribute to the discourse in general here on RatSkep
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In many threads there is often a dispute about the meaning of words or terms. In support of a certain proposed definition of a word or term, posters often cut and paste a link to an on-line dictionary, and this appeal to authority is assumed to settle the matter. I would like to suggest that this is not that good a practice to engage in when dealing with semantic issues.
Dictionaries are good at certain things, but actually rather poor at other things.
Dictionaries are authoritative on the spelling of a word, given that our culture prefers consistency across usage. (Alltho this woz not alweys the case. Spelling woz a bit morr up to thee individuwal in earlier timz. And konsitensee is not a pre-requizit for understanding.)
Similarly dictionaries are authoritative on the part of speech, that is, they describe whether a word is a verb, noun, adjective and so on. The part of speech labeling goes into slightly more detail in such areas as whether a verb is transitive or intransitive or both, but usually avoids other categories, such as whether a verb is stative, telic or such like.
Further, dictionaries often lay claim to describing the pronunciation of a word, although there may be a tendency to reflect a certain pronunciation as ‘correct’ with other variants reduced to sub-categories of the ‘standard’ language.
Other aspects of a word that may be dealt with by a dictionary are its likely collocations (corpus based dictionaries are often good about this…non-corpus based, not so much) and perhaps it etymology and history of usage.
What dictionaries are often rather poor at are definitions of the word at hand. Because dictionaries tried to be comprehensive in coverage of the lexicon, but were bound volumes, a shorthand for definitions was developed in order to keep size down. This has carried over into electronic versions where size is not an issue any more. Definitions in dictionaries are often guilty of a very superficial gloss of a meaning and of falling into the traps of obscurity and circularity. Apart from second language learners, most people using a dictionary usually have knowledge of a word which, even though it may be unconscious, is far more comprehensive and nuanced than even the most detailed dictionary.