English

Proper noun

Dictionary

1. Nickname for a swot or studious person, or one who uses needlessly complicated words.
   • 1993, Fred Hartley, That Morals Thing (page 31)

     His friends called him "Dictionary." There were other names they called him that were far worse.

   • 1996, Kirk H. Beetz, Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction

     He won a scholarship to a prestigious British inspired secondary school, Government College in Umuahia, and also gained a reputation for knowledge in his home village, where they called him Dictionary.

   • 2002, Bart Schneider, Secret Love (page 67)

     Hillis Brown turned toward Simon and whispered, "Hey, DICtionary^[sic], don't worry, just because you sing like Johnny doesn't mean you gotta be a faggot."

   • 2013, Bridgette Kasuka, African Writers (page 404)

     Meanwhile, he applied himself so diligently to his formal education that schoolmates called him “Dictionary.” This effort won him admission to a British-run boarding school with an excellent library.

English

Noun

dictionary ‎(plural dictionaries)

1. A reference work with a list of words from one or more languages, normally ordered alphabetically, explaining each word's meaning, and sometimes containing information on its etymology, pronunciation, usage, translations, and other data.
   • 1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 7, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 339:

     But what other kind(s) of syntactic information should be included in Lexical Entries? Traditional dictionaries such as Hornby's (1974) Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English include not only categorial information in their entries, but also information about the range of Complements which a given item permits (this information is represented by the use of a number/letter code).

2. By extension, any work that has a list of material organized alphabetically; e.g., biographical dictionary, encyclopedic dictionary.
3. (computing) An associative array, a data structure where each value is referenced by a particular key, analogous to words and definitions in a physical dictionary.
   • 2011, Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Brad Wilson, Professional ASP.NET MVC 3:

     User calls RouteCollection.GetVirtualPath, passing in a RequestContext, a dictionary of values, and an optional route name used to select the correct route to generate the URL.

• For usage examples of this term, see Citations:dictionary.

Synonyms

• (reference book listing words): wordbook; for more, see Wikisaurus:dictionary

Derived terms

See also

• lexicon
• encyclopedia
• vocabulary
• dictionarily

Translations

Anagrams

• indicatory

Verb

dictionary ‎(third-person singular simple present dictionaries, present participle dictionarying, simple past and past participle dictionaried)

1. (transitive) To look up in a dictionary.
2. (transitive) To add to a dictionary.
   • 1866, William Henry Ward, The international day, night, and fog signal telegraph, page 12:

     By a reference to the following dictionaried abbreviations, the simplicity and harmony of each sentence will be manifestly apparent; although it does not embrace everything, and could not, as it would be far too voluminous for general use.

   • 2001, The Michigan Alumnus, page 25:

     Should I use a word that a lot of people use but isn't in the dictionary? Uncle Phil would rather get a root canal than say he was scrapbooking, because the word isn't dictionaried.

3. (intransitive, rare) To compile a dictionary.
   • 1864, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 96, page 334:

     They [dictionary-makers] may have had their romance at home — may have been crossed in love, and thence driven to dictionarying; may have been involved in domestic tragedies — who can say?

4. (intransitive) To appear in a dictionary.