Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Looking for dictionary recommedations

Mark Millman · 12 Jun 2006, 06:35 · from 2006-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: millman at heimdallr.dyndns.org (Mark Millman)
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 02:35:03 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) Looking for dictionary recommedations
In-Reply-To: <20060612013232.77697.qmail at web36811.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20060612022049.O6691-100000 at heimdallr.dyndns.org>

Kate,

You might also want to get a copy of _Mrs.
Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and
Preposterous Words_, by Josefa Heifetz Byrne.
Wolfe has referred to it in, I believe, an
essay or an interview, and it has some words
that are tough to find even in the OED.

Then there's always _The Castle of the Otter_,
collected in _Castle of Days_ but frequently
available on the secondary market, and
Michael Andre-Driussi's _Lexicon Urthus_,
though this latter is very difficult to find,
and usually quite costly when found.  I have
a copy of _Castle_ I can give you--let me
know by private e-mail whether or not you al-
ready have a copy--but the three copies of
the _Lexicon_ I found are $225 (abebooks),
$250 (Amazon), and $495 (!--abebooks again),
respectively.

Or you personally may send me vocabulary
lists if you like, and I'll send definitions.
(This offer available only to Kate Savage.)

Mark


On Sun, 11 Jun 2006, Kate Savage wrote:

> I am looking for dictionary recommen-
> dations. I would like to purchase a
> good reference book for all those ob-
> scure word's Wolfe use that I have
> never seen before. I am thinking if
> getting a used copy of the Compact
> Edition of the Oxford English Dic-
> tionary but it isn't the handiest
> format for casually looking up unfa-
> miliar words. I am also thinking of
> the Webster's Third New Internation-
> al Dictionary, Unabridged.
>
> Any other suggestions?
>
> Thanks in advance.



An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net