The Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words

Abstract

The general dictionaries which we all have on our bookshelves and desks, and which we constantly consult, have one significant but little-considered characteristic in common: much of their contents is never used. When was the last time you needed to find out the meaning of the or but, the spelling of cat or dog? And yet dictionaries compiled for adult native-speakers of English take care to include such straightforward words, which present no difficulty to dictionary users, and which consequently are seldom – if ever – looked up. As dictionaries descend the ladder of size past 'concise' to 'pocket', it is the less frequent and less familiar words that are omitted; the ones we all know are allowed to stay. We rather take this feature of dictionaries for granted, as if that is how they have always been, and therefore that is how they should always be. But that is not how they have always been. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the commonest type of lexical reference book was one that included only those words that might present some difficulty to the user, through unfamiliarity, orthographic irregularity, etc. These are termed 'hard-word dictionaries'. But in the 18th century, the practice began to grow of including more everyday words as well. Confirmed by Dr Johnson's magisterial English Dictionary of 1755, this is the tradition that has won out: we now assume that dictionaries will be inventories of all the words of a language.