Ammon Shea has more than 1000 dictionaries at home. In the 1990s, he once read Webster's Dictionary (second edition) from beginning to end, and the whole process was very difficult. It didn't do him any good: it didn't make him smarter or improve his exam results. This seems to hinder his ability to express himself. He has too many words in his mind to say a simple sentence. But he likes the feeling that his mind is full of words. The next step was naturally to read through the Oxford Dictionary, but Shea hesitated.

"Everyone knows that the Oxford Dictionary is huge. It is profound, serious and detailed, and each entry is like a seminar on etymology. Can he finish reading these 20 volumes of dictionaries full of abbreviations, lowercase letters, foreign etymologies and old spellings? Can anyone read 59 million words of explanatory prose in one year? It is equivalent to reading a novel by john grisham every day. Will Shea become a person who can't understand after reading the letter' N' in history? " The 20 books in the Oxford Dictionary add up to 137 pounds (about 62 kilograms) and 2 1730 pages. If you finish reading it in one year, you will read nearly 60 pages every day. In a year, he studies 9 to 10 hours a day, five days a week.

Shea decided to give it a try and wrote down his reading process in the book, one chapter for each letter. He sat under the window, put his feet on the soft chair and began to read. Difficulties followed and he began to have a headache. He saw a gray thing on the edge of his vision, and he began to have a backache. The noise of dancing or cooking in the neighbor's house distracted him. He couldn't help looking up other dictionaries he owned and comparing their definitions, which slowed him down.

Later, Shea went to Central Park or benches in public libraries, but these places were not ideal. Finally, he settled down in a basement of Hunter College Library of City University of New York, surrounded by legal documents that would not distract him. He drank a lot of coffee while watching and put on glasses.

Shea finally wrote Reading the Oxford English Dictionary: One Person, One Year (2 1 730 pages), which consists of 26 chapters, an introduction and an appendix. At the beginning of each chapter, he introduced his reading process in about 5 pages, and then extracted 10 to 30 words from the dictionary for comments. For example, "fard, put makeup on your face to cover up your flaws. I suspect that someone will stand up from their seats and say, excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom to wipe my face. It seems impolite to use four-letter words starting with f at the dinner table. " The word with "fart" means "fart". )

Reading a dictionary can sometimes be unbearable. For example, the word "set" takes up 25 pages. There are 45 1 pages of words starting with the negative prefix "un", which is as boring as reading a phone book. After reading the words beginning with the letter "W", you will find that all the words are not fresh, because they all come from Anglo-Saxon, while most of the other words come from ancient Greek or Latin.

Shea said that the Oxford English Dictionary also has plots and is full of literariness. When you read it, you will feel that you are absorbing the contents of more than a dozen books. Many sentences in Shakespeare's plays are used as examples. Although these sentences are separated and placed everywhere, they are still there. It's like reading Timon of Athens and Macbeth backwards, sideways and backwards. After reading it, Shea had a new understanding of the dictionary: "I don't think the dictionary is fully utilized. Many well-educated and dedicated people have worked hard to compile these dictionaries, which contain all kinds of interesting information. Many people look them up just to check whether they spell a word correctly, which is like treating a great novel as a paper town. "

The following article is about Qian Zhongshu.

Most people look up dictionaries to understand the meaning of words, while some people regard dictionaries as interesting leisure reading materials. According to many authors, Mr. Qian Zhongshu is such a reader. He carefully read the heavy dictionary one by one beside the letters; During a long journey, he took an English dictionary that others thought was "boring" and read it happily for a month. On the ship to England, he took Dr. Johnson's English dictionary with him, which won him great pleasure. He claimed that he was too interesting to be a humanitarian. I think if we have this spirit to learn an English dictionary, we will make great progress in many aspects.

Lin Yutang once attached great importance to The Concise Oxford Dictionary and The Pocket Oxford Dictionary, calling them "secrets in the pillow". He believes that the choice of words in these two dictionaries is based on the needs of readers, and it is very useful to use words as living materials, for example. In fact, with the development of lexicography, good English dictionaries have emerged one after another for decades, especially for readers whose mother tongue is not English. For example, Oxford Dictionary of Advanced Modern English, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Chambers Dictionary of Popular English Learning, Collins Dictionary of Selected English, etc. -The definition is simple and easy to understand (Longman's definition takes about 2,000 words), with accurate and profound examples, concise grammar and interesting analysis. For English learners, its practicability has surpassed Lin Yutang's Pillow Secrets. You might as well take one or two of them as reading materials, and you can't bear to read them. Even if you can't live without it for a moment, then you have to learn the language. Among them, Collins is the simplest, and Oxford and Longman have two versions.