Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
What do you meen by need? The book I am reading now use a lot of archaic words. I had for example to look up "picaroon" today.
I also seems to need the dictionary to tell me when I have guessed wrong what a word mean. I just happened to look up "moribund" today and realized I had guessed a bit wrong about the meaning.
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Tommy hits on one of the reasons I find a dictionary essential. I have similarly looked up a word to find it doesn't precisely mean what I think it means. For me this is often a delight, because of the unexpected shade it can add to the text. It's particularly important for me, for instance, when reading poetry, where word-choice is perhaps at its tightest, though for general reading of literature I still find it of very high importance. My vocabulary is pretty good, but sometimes working on meaning from context is insufficiently edifying for me. I have a "need" for precision in understanding a lot of my preferred reading material, and word meaning and etymology is part of that desired precision.
As another advantage, I find the English texts I read sometimes sprinkled with, for instance, French phrases, so language dictionaries are also helpful.
I would not buy a device that didn't have dictionary lookup (and commercial dictionaries of my choice) from within the text I was reading. It's one of the reasons why my shortlist back-when was the Iliad and the Cybook. It's also why I use
Answers on all my workstations.
Cheers,
Marc