Hardcover Dictionaries Are Dead

Manateeslooklikewaterballoons just achieved the impossible: she wrote a hilarious post about dictionaries.—Sparkitors

Don’t get me wrong, the concept of dictionaries is great. You hand one to a student, and all of a sudden they’ll stop spelling the word “dog” like “jubhtgrvfe87654gf.” Immediately, their written work appears more sophisticated, and I'm all for that! But is it really necessary to cram every single word in the English language into a 700-pound book? WE ARE LIVING IN A TIME OF TECHNOLOGICAL MIRACLES, MY FRIENDS. Online dictionaries and spell-checkers are the key to the future.  Need convincing? Here’s 5 perfectly good reasons to hate hardcover dictionaries.

Dictionaries are heavy! In elementary school when we had to look up words, I could barely haul the classroom dictionary back to my desk. It’s roughly 900,000,000 pounds, more or less.  If Wall-e ate a sumo wrestler and did that epic compressing thing to him, the cubic mass of sumo would weigh less than a dictionary. I’m serious.

You’re forced to sing the ABCs every time you look up something—because really, who knows if T comes before Q? Honestly, I love the ABC song. In fact, I have twelve different covers of it on my ipod, and every time I listen to it, it reduces me to tears with its pure lyrical beauty. However, I don’t like singing the ABCs in the middle of a quiet classroom, filled with popular people watching and judging my every move. It just gets awkward then.

The print is unbearably small. What size font do dictionary writers use, -7? Sure, the children’s dictionaries loosened up a bit and used a size -5, but it’s still necessary to use a magnifying glass no matter which hardcover dictionary you choose to read. Of course, online dictionaries have never had this font size problem. (You’d look like a moron trying to use a magnifying glass with a computer screen.)

Spongebob uses an online dictionary. He can’t be bothered to spend his awesome spongy life slumped over at a desk, looking up words all day. He forgets dictionaries and goes out jellyfishing like a total badass instead.

Paper cuts! How horrible they are. Dictionaries only make this infamous phenomenon worse; with all the page turning going on, your risk of getting wounded by paper doubles. I once found a severed finger inside a dictionary. Okay, not really, but it seems like something that could totally happen.

In conclusion, on a scale of 1 to 10, dictionaries are somewhere in the negative twenties. Trying to pack an entire language into a single book is just an accident waiting to happen. Online dictionaries are so much simpler, and way more awesome. Plus, I used spellcheck on every other word in this article. So use my advice. Go hug your computer. Go look up words online in just a few nanoseconds. Go host a dictionary-burning party and invite all your closest friends. Just please, do whatever you can to rid the world of these horrible, heavy nightmares.

We LOVE online dictionaries. How about you?

Related post: Welcome to the SparkNotes Suburban Dictionary