Your Friend, The Dictionary

Bible teachers communicate ideas. We don't make these ideas up. They are already there in Scripture. Those ideas are packaged in words. If we are going to accurately dig out the message of scripture and accurately deliver that message, we need to know what we are reading and saying.

That's where Your Friend, The Dictionary, comes in. You can take any word in Scripture or your Strong's concordance or Greek/ Hebrew lexicon and look it up so you know what it means. If a definition doesn't satisfy, you can look up the words used in the definition. Look long enough and you might find a synonym listing. This will be a group of words that mean a similar thing. A good dictionary will have a summary sentence describing what the words have in common. Then it will give each word's unique shade of meaning, where it is distinguished from the others.

That practically hands you the tools you need to grasp a Biblical idea. Once you grasp it, it's yours. You can hand it to someone else. That is teaching - causing someone to learn something. But you can't give it to someone if you haven't grasped it yourself. A dictionary helps you to grasp the idea.

When it's time to organize your teaching the dictionary comes in handy, too. A teacher needs to be clear in how ideas are expressed. If you can't find the right word, use a thesaurus. Then check the definition with the dictionary.

Now, you might think this is a lot of work. Of course it is. This is why God made Your Other Friend, The Computer. With a computer-based dictionary you can click on definitions much faster than you can flip pages. You won't be distracted with other entries while looking for a word because you go right to the word. You can afford to look up even words that you already know, in case there is a definition that unlocks a concept for you.

What dictionary is best? The more words, the better. The more exhaustive, the better. If you need a word and the dictionary doesn't have it, you're stuck. These considerations apply to computer-based dictionaries as well.

The one I use most is Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. I have a Third Edition Unabridged that I also use, but not as often. The Collegiate runs only under Classic (the previous Macintosh operating system under System X) and has fewer words, but it has synonyms with both a summary sentence and the individual shades of meaning. For some reason, the Unabridged (which does run under System X) only has the differences of meaning, but not the summary sentences. I find those summaries so useful I end up using the Unabridged much less though it has more definitions. I wrote to Merriam-Webster asking for the summaries to be added to the next edition. Why don't you write them, too?

The other issue with choosing dictoionary software is the user interface. Here the beggars cannot be the choosers. We have to take whatever wretched interface the designers give us. This is my main problem with computer dictionaries. My feeling is one should be able to navigate the whole dictionary from the keyboard instead of having to use a mouse to access a feature. Who uses a dictionary? Writers. What do writers use? Keyboards. If writers werer artists, maybe they would use a mouse, but it's ridiculous to have to use a mouse and interrupt the flow of keyboard work. If the designers would make a simple, powerful interface, I bet they would see more sales of their product. People really need a dictionary. More would buy one they could easily use.

That's my rant for this blog.

For accuracy and clarity you need help. Why not get Your Friend, The Dictionary?