Read the Dictionary

One of the best gifts my mom ever gave me was a red Websters New World Dictionary when I was a Sr in high school. In fact I still have it and my kids use it for their homework :)

I find myself getting lost in it when I go to look up one word and I wander around the page at the other words. The are so interesting how one word is derived from another.

Berta would tease me and tell me I would get brain damage when she saw me reading the phone book or the penny saver,
But I guess the dictionary was ok, lol

I’ve finished the section for ‘A’, and I’m already shocked at how much I’m learning. I’ve never been able to say that I’ve learned something from page one of a book, until now. (I didn’t know the difference between an acronym and initialism.) I have a running list of all of the little things I’ve learned, and I’ll review it when I’m done.

It’s simultaneously humbling and astonishing… I know about 95% of the words, which makes me proud and strokes my ego (which is perhaps why I enjoy reading it so much), yet it’s also humbling to realize the things I didn’t know: all of the words I was using without thinking about it, which in actuality have such a heavy significance; all of the items I was talking about without actually knowing what defines them; all of the strange things I had heard people talk of and accepted as fact, yet never fully understood the origins of.

I’m definitely going to finish and re-read the dictionary.

I love it.

I’m on page 36 and still on the A’s.

Its hard work…lol duh. I cant get it out of my head that I have to read pages on pages of a’s. Im on like page 3 and I cant recall anything I read so far except aardvark.lmao Glad to see other people doing/have done it. I started it and I will finish it… I was gonna make a goal to complete it in a year then realized i would have to average about 4 pages a day which would be a lot of work…. I think ill start out wit 2 a day back and front to see how that goes.

I’m not really sure why I want to do this, but I do. I can never get past the first three pages…

always wanted to do this!
its seems so exciting lol

Always wanted to do it. Besides it’s a cheat to help me with some of my other goals. Poetry, Languages, Screenplay, General reading. Oh, and why does over a hundred people have this as a goal when my improving my hygiene, IMPROVING, has me the only one?!?
And it’s IMPROVING mind you. gahhhhhhhhhhh.

I’ve started reading so many books that I haven’t been reading the dictionary but I’m determined to accomplish this goal so I’m midway through the C’s.

got a new job where i work 12 hour shifts…yeah…reading the dictionary made a few of them go by quickly. i even made flash cards. somebody shoot me.

Being in high school and all, I know that I will be writing a myriad of papers and essays in the next couple of years. I know that I have the capability to write, but I can never think of good words. Word choice has always been a problem with me, and I know that I could be doing so much better, thus I decided to read the dictionary, a feat which I also said I would do in middle school but never got around to doing.