If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.

There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.

We think people go to a dictionary to find out what a word means. Most people go to the dictionary because they don't want to look stupid.

Most consumers don't have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one... so they flip the book over, then go to the back, and it says, 'Over 250,000 entries.' And they go, 'Great, this dictionary must be awesome!'

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.