MINNEAPOLIS — Do you own a dictionary anymore?
For years, I schlepped a red hardbound Merriam-Webster’s tome, along with a dogeared Roget’s Thesaurus, to every newsroom cubicle I worked at across the country. In permanent marker I even scrawled the sides of the pages with my name, so paranoid was I that someone would abduct these treasured guides that helped me craft what I believed to be beautiful and exacting sentences.
But most of us have shed these extra weights from our lives, knowing that we can search for the meaning of any esoteric word simply by reaching for our phones.
And that’s why the latest reference book displayed at the still-kicking Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis is such a curiosity.
Weighing about 25 pounds, this beast of a dictionary even looks professorial. It’s bedecked in a worn corduroy binding in a shade of dark chocolate. Wise and verbose, it’s also more than 100 years old.
“It’s almost comical,” acknowledged the bookstore’s marketing manager, Annie Metcalf, when I gasped upon seeing the opus. When the book is closed, its spine measures more than 9 inches tall.
The last, oh, maybe couple thousand pages of the book are actually a “supplement,” apparently because “they decided there weren’t enough words” in the first volume, she joked.
Known as a Century Dictionary, the book (published in 1914) found its way to Magers & Quinn in recent weeks when a customer decided to part with it. It was a busy day, so the booksellers didn’t get a chance to ask her about how it came into her possession. They didn’t think it would be easy to resell, so they took it off her hands and now display it on a rickety end table.
The staff — who naturally appreciate books with a back story — think this antiquarian piece of merchandise is pretty cool. The item is not for sale, but for the public’s enjoyment.
You can flip through the thin pages, albeit delicately, and see how much the English language has changed, and how much it has stayed the same. The entry for the word “give,” for example, goes on for pages. It quotes the Bible and Milton and explains the meaning of various offshoots, like “give away,” “give one’s hand,” and the no-longer-trending “give one a flap with a foxtail.” (Definition: to make a fool of someone.)
Black-and-white illustrations offer visual depictions of everything from the human pelvis to the black-backed jackal.
Shockingly, this version of the Century Dictionary is abridged. When it was first published in New York near the end of the 19th century, it came in six alphabetized volumes, a hybrid between a dictionary and an encyclopedia.
One of the leading scholars on the history of this reference source is linguist Anatoly Liberman of the University of Minnesota. “I know more about the Century Dictionary than anyone else in the world,” he assures me in a tone that sounds more matter-of-fact than arrogant.
“It’s a splendid dictionary,” said Liberman, who consults it every day to research word origins and definitions. “It has aged very well, unlike most of us.”
While you wouldn’t want to consult this dictionary to catch up on the latest in nuclear physics, Liberman said, it still has its use. “If you are interested in cockroaches, probably not too much has been discovered since 1914.”
For the history buffs: The Century Dictionary was seen as a contemporary rival to the Oxford English Dictionary; a feud over the root of the word “cockney” launched open warfare between British and American lexicographers.
Today, of course, the Century Dictionary is more or less forgotten, Liberman concedes. Some surveys suggest that book culture overall is down, as well. In a Gallup poll from 2021, for instance, Americans reported reading an annual average of 12.6 books in any format, down from 18.5 in 1999.
I’m reminded of the comic Sheng Wang’s words about how bookstores used to be a source of wonder for him. “When I was a kid, I used to walk into a bookstore like, ‘Look at all this stuff I’m gonna learn,’” he said. “As a grown-up I walk into a bookstore like, ‘Look at all this stuff I’m never gonna know.’
“It’s hard to see your ignorance alphabetized,” he lamented.
A plodding reader myself, I can relate. But what do we lose with the decline of physical copies of books, dictionaries and even the newspaper? Yes, all of these things exist online, but the digital versions play more to a person’s active curiosity than their passive curiosity. (With a newspaper that I can feel in my hands and physically turn its pages, for example, I’m more likely to scan a story I thought I had no interest in reading.) We’re blessed to live in a world where digital and paper versions can still co-exist, where we can access information when and how we want it.
The Century Dictionary harks to a time when we assumed almost all of life’s answers could be found in a book. Today, it doesn’t purport to hold a candle to the vastness of the internet or the voracious growth of AI.
“It’s outdated, like any reference book in the world,” Liberman said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
