Get to Love Words - Buy a Dictionary

Do you remember a few months ago I wrote about how I'd bought a fantastic huge Thesaurus in a sale at a bargain price? Well, today I bought the dictionary to go with it. It's called Collins English Dictionary and it was on sale in WH Smith for £6.25, which is fantastic value as the original recommended price was £25. That makes a saving of 75%.

There are 1040 pages of definitions plus a further 47 pages of other information - everything from British and Canadian Prime Ministers to Member States of the EU and even several pages about music. I love it! I could sit and read it all day!

It reminds me of the time when I got my first school dictionary back in the 1960s. My primary school class had learned to read sufficiently well to be issued with a dictionary as well as a reading book.

What we were given was an etymological dictionary - one which gives the sources from which the words were derived. I loved reading about these, especially the Latin and Greek words and I was delighted when I was eventually able to learn these languages for myself.

Meanwhile, at the tender age of 6 or 7, I'd read the dictionary every night the way other kids read comics - two or three entire pages at a time! I was fascinated by all these marvellous words, and I still am to this day.

Here are some of the words I've enjoyed reading about today. Perhaps you'd like to look them up in your own dictionary or in one of the online dictionaries you can find on the internet.

mojo - zucchetto - Chiltern Hundreds - percipient - sloop - lubricious - raddled