Reading the entire dictionary front to back! It’s something I’ve always wanted to try. If I’m going to attempt this, why not blog about it? I’ll post any interesting discoveries I make.

Of course the first word in the dictionary is a, defined as the first letter of the alphabet, and then defined as “an article to indicate an unspecified or unidentified individual.” Already I can see how maddening it must be to write for the dictionary, when every word you use in any definition must also be defined on its own.

The first “real” word in the dictionary is, as we all know, aardvark. It’s “a large burrowing African mammal that feeds on ants with its long sticky tongue.” Sadly, this dictionary does not have those old-timey woodcut illustrations, so we have to imagine an aardvark based on this description.

Don’t worry, I won’t go through this whole thing word-by-word, just the ones I find interesting. I wonder if animal descriptions will be the most fun, because abalone is “any of a genus of large edible mollusks with a flattened slightly spiral shell with holes along the edge.” I wonder what’s going in the dictionary offices where they felt the need it was important to include the word “edible” in that.

Abattoir is defined as just “slaughterhouse.” Did anyone NOT learn that from The Simpsons?

The Abominable Snowman is a “creature with human or apelike characteristics reported to exist in the high Himalayas.” It doesn’t say the creature is mythical, or folklore, or – dare I say it – fictional. Do the Merriam-Webster people know something I don’t? This is followed by abominate, a verb described as praying away an ill omen. Cool.

Abracadabra (one word, not two) is “a magical charm or incantation against calamity.” Is that accurate? Magicians traditionally say this upon the big reveal, so I always thought it meant something along the lines of “Look at this!” The internet at large tells me that there are multiple suspected etymologies for the word, and no one can agree on its true origins. As such, the dictionary’s second definition is just “gibberish.”

How do you define the undefinable? Abstract is “a quality apart from an object” and “having only intrinsic form with little or no pictorial representation.” Is that helpful? If it is, then how could one possibly define abstract expressionism in one sentence? It’s “art that expresses the artist’s emotions and expressions through abstract form.” Easy as that, I guess.

Ace has multiple definitions, but the one I didn’t know is that the number one dot on dice is the “ace.” You’d think this would have made it into all those Dungeons and Dragons modules.

Acme is not the name of a company, but the highest point of a structure. All the better for Wile E. Coyote to fall off of.

The dictionary doesn’t have a theatrical definition of act, just that it’s “to perform an action.” But then actor is “a person who acts in a play, television show, motion picture, etc.”

A few pages of ordinary stuff later, we get agogo, defined as “a café and disco in Paris, France.” This is followed by agony, which is not just “struggle” and “anguish,” but also a gathering or contest for a prize involving “extreme pain of mind or body.” Now I want to see a French horror movie about this contest called Agogo Agony.

A few more pages of ordinary stuff – including an entire page of words with “air” as a prefix – and we end the first 20 pages with alligator, “short-legged reptiles resembling crocodiles but having broader and shorter snouts.” Man, gators must be sick of always being compared to crocs. Why can’t they be their own guys?

Next: The town from Jaws?

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