I love to look up the definition of words. Most likely, I enjoy it because I’m always surprised by what I find, and I love definitive answers. Today, I was reading a website that used the word “intransigent”. I didn’t know what it meant, although I had an idea from the context. And I did exactly what I usually do to find the definition. I searched for it in Google. As often happens with big words like this, the top result in Google is the dictionary definition.
I couldn’t help but think that if the top result for the word (i.e. it’s most cited use) is its definition, maybe you shouldn’t use it… Then again, maybe that’s the best reason to use it.
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:48 pm
I’m always looking up words too, but my method of choice is typing “define:” and then whatever word into the search engine. It gives you a list of definitions from different sources.
May 25th, 2006 at 7:09 am
Hm, this is always an inner struggle for me. When is it appropriate to use “big words?” Sometimes, if you want to be succinct, you need to. But sometimes, you need people to really understand what you’re saying, and a big word isn’t the best choice.
And sometimes you just don’t want people to think you’re being condescending, which you’re definitely not, but people just think that a lot . . .
Anyway, I liked this post.
May 26th, 2006 at 8:59 am
I always find that when I try to use big words in conversation I either stutter. mispronounce, or just get the word wrong altogether…
Luckily, that’s the great thing about websites.. You can take the time to seem a lot smarter that you actually are. Of course, sometimes when you don’t take the time, it has the opposite effect.
June 18th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
I tried using a firefox add-on that popped up a little ajax implementation of a dictionary search whenever you double-clicked on a word. Unfortunately, that became crazy annoying. I used firefox’s “add a keyword for this search functionality” for Dictionary.com so now I just type “d wordgoeshere.” Handy!