Take a quick look through the bookshelves of your house and try to find the oldest and most recent dictionary your family owns. What’s the oldest dictionary you have? Which edition is it? See if your oldest dictionary has definitions for words like: ringtone, drama queen, internet, DVD… or CD, for that matter.
In this age of googling instant answers, some might question if dictionaries are becoming obsolete. But old dictionaries, like old street directories, are great indicators of how things have changed over time. For instance, it was only in 2006 that ‘google’ got added into the Oxford English Dictionary. The word, of course, means use the Google search engine to retrieve information. But it could just refer to any other search engine. Another similar word that comes to mind is ‘photoshop’ – which has come to mean to digitally manipulate images using software.
Laokokok’s first dictionary, entitled “A First Dictionary”, dates to 1958. I wonder if that edition included to word ‘google‘, which would refer to a type of ball delivery in the game of Cricket.
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