October 16 is Dictionary Day, Noah Webster’s 257th birthday. To celebrate the big day, I googled “dictionary” and got back 484 million hits in 0.25 seconds. Typing in “google” got me close to 7.4 billion hits, proving, in case you needed proof, that Google is bigger than the dictionary.
The first four hits for google were links to the company, and the fifth linked to Nicholas Carr’s 2008 essay, “Is Google making us stupid?” If there's a definition of google in the remaining 7,379,999,995 hits, I'm too stupid to find it. But a faster way to look up the meaning is to go to an online dictionary.
Merriam-Webster's online dictionary will tell you that google means “to use the Google search engine.” Use it in a sentence? How about, “What you just did to find this dictionary”? The online OED adds the cricket meaning, from the noun googly, “a ball which breaks from the off, though bowled with apparent leg-break action.” To understand anything having to do with cricket, you won’t need a dictionary, you’ll need a culture transplant.
By the way, if you look up webster in the OED, you’ll find that it’s sometimes used in the U.S. as a synonym for dictionary, but if you look it up in an actual Merriam-Webster dictionary, what you’ll find is that webster means ‘weaver.’
Above: Merriam-Webster’s definition of google. A popularity meter (upper right) shows the term is frequently looked up. Below: OED definition of google adds the cricket term.
In the old days, people used print dictionaries to look up words, but they also used them to hide money, press flowers, or hold open doors. Plus, placed on a chair seat, these big books were great for helping a young child reach the table. We’ve had to give up some of these bonus features in exchange for the speed and convenience of online lookups and dictionaries built into devices. But the digital world lets us replicate at least one thing we could do with dead-tree dictionaries: on Dictionary Day, try pressing a virtual flower between the pages of your digital dictionary.
[You can read my previous Dictionary Day posts here, It’s Dictionary Day: Take a banned word to lunch, and here, Spell the American way on Dictionary Day.]
