Have you recently been diagnosed with DEAD?  Does this diagnosis leave you feeling marginalized or perhaps even overrun by the world around you?

Do not despair.  The prognosis is more hopeful than the acronym suggests.  You can likely live a long and mostly satisfying life.  You can stand proudly by your bookcases, breathe deeply, and know that you are neither powerless nor alone.

Key symptoms of Dictionary Engagement and Accumulation Disorder (DEAD) include having multiple (possibly even dozens) of physical dictionaries and encyclopedic reference books in one’s home, using them regularly, and being open to acquiring, or at least perusing, even more dictionaries in book form.

I argue that these symptoms do not necessarily indicate an illogical need to clutch at the past in fear.  They are reasonable lifestyle choices that hitherto were not considered disordered thinking at all.  DEAD was not in earlier diagnostic statistical manuals.  Unfortunately, search engines, online dictionaries, and the LLMs of AI have reduced to anomalous behaviour the healthy curiosity of looking something up in a book.

If you, or someone you care about, has been diagnosed with DEAD, then read on.  If you’ve been encouraged to cull or (gasp) toss your reference book collection, you can use these arguments to toss at your naysayers instead.  You can survive—with reference dictionaries and pride still intact.

Ready When You Are

Physical copies of dictionaries are ready when you are.  You can get results without depending on an internet connection or a company’s website.  Whether or not you have paid your bills, a dictionary on your shelf is there for you when you are checking spelling, meaning, or hyphenation.  Heck, even if the power is out, your book-form dictionary is your companion while you are shivering by a window during the day, or reading by candlelight at night.

And chances are, your favourite dictionary is right where you left it.  No one has changed its address or constructed a paywall.

Respect and Boundaries

My Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is not tracking my behaviour.  My Chambers Biographical Dictionary does not hassle me with popups or nag at me to buy, subscribe, enrol, or click.  These dictionaries do not ask for a password either.  They respect me for purchasing once and then providing them with a good home and a job to do.

Physical dictionaries provide us with reliable information in a way that promotes focus.  Rather than sifting through varied and somewhat dubious online search results with fingers crossed, or wondering if a chatbot is hallucinating or providing plagiarized responses, we can grab a desk reference book for just enough verified information to get us started and keep us on task, but not too much to be discouraging or distracting.  When I pick up my thesaurus, I don’t find myself thinking, “I wonder if that’s accurate.” I also don’t think, “Maybe I should also check Facebook,” or find myself with three items in my online shopping cart.  The rabbit holes of internet research are many and deep.

Physical dictionaries provide some solid ground.  The meanings and spellings of folderol or foliaceous remain the same in my Canadian Oxford as the last time I checked.  They withstood time and scrutiny before their inclusion.  However, with too many disparate meanings available to us online, some of which may be quite short-lived, we are less certain of the ground on which we are building and sharing meaning.  Sure, language evolves, and not all change is bad, but each new term and original usage should have to put in time under serious study first.  Our physical dictionaries respect our time and footing, as well as the language as a whole.

Active Engagement

Striving for precise language helps us think and communicate clearly.  During that striving process, when we are searching a dictionary and deciding what word to use and write, we are active in ways that we take for granted but are, nonetheless, working in our favour to build health, learning, and experience.

Consider physical activity.  If you go and grab your big, hardcover dictionary from the shelf, you are engaging muscles, encouraging blood flow, building strength, and giving your eyes, wrists, and other body parts a break.  Think of all the small but beneficial movements of sliding the chair out, twisting, turning, rising, walking, grabbing, holding, and then scanning and reading.  Computer use and screen time can create painful muscle and joint conditions, decreased flexibility and strength, mental agitation, and eyestrain.  Our bodies are meant to move—not atrophy in the un-ergonomic torture of too much tech.  Plus, movement improves blood flow around the body and brain leading to better cognitive ability.

Even as we have the book in hand, we are still active as we determine where to open the book and how long to engage in flipping pages.  We are also getting clues and learning about order and spelling.  To find the word we need, we must scan, encounter, think about, and rule out words we do not need.  All this time, from desk to shelf, from flipping to result, we have the word and idea working in our minds; plus, we are subconsciously absorbing other words and language patterns as we go.  That extra time and activity are beneficial.  Compare this to looking up a word online: you type in a word and then the spelling and definition are dispensed faster than stale chips from a vending machine.  Limited movement, limited thought.

Using a book-form dictionary also encourages us to consider spatial context as well as sensory details to create meaning, memory, and understanding.  Consider all of this mental activity: mapping out and recalling in your mind where your shelf is, the location of the book on the shelf, the location of the word within the book, where the word resides on the page, if the page is recto or verso, and determining which of the supplied versions of the word or its definitions apply to your particular situation.  We feel the book’s weight and paper’s texture, hear the flipping sound of turning a page, and see the words and images as we scan and digest.

Experience and Inspiration

Dictionaries thus provide a rich and memorable experience.  They stand language still for us, like capturing a moment in a photograph, but each time we come to them, we are a bit changed and can notice different words or images.  I spoke to a few writers while preparing this article, and all fondly remembered the various dictionaries of their lives.  They recalled colour, type of paper used, and size of the book.  They also recalled what stage of life they were in when they acquired or used a particular dictionary.  I don’t think the speedy results of an online dictionary will be remembered as fondly.

More than one writer commented on how enjoyable it is to encounter new words on the way to the word you are seeking.  What a vast collection of jewels to mine for writing and imagining! If you learn a new word, perhaps you will want to test it out in a few different sentences, kind of like walking around in a pair of shoes before buying.  Or, for the brave and creative, open a dictionary to a random page and choose five new words to incorporate into a poem or story.

Even simply browsing can be rewarding and inspiring.  A collection of dictionaries (old and new) can spark curiosity, invite learning, and take us to times and places that a quick online search will not.  Think also of what you would rather discover as you wander some post-apocalyptic, dystopian wasteland: someone’s old, broken computer or a tattered box of dictionaries and desk reference books?

So, back to that dreadful DEAD diagnosis.  Forget it.  If you have the space for them, those nicely curated collections of words and learning are fine just where they are—on nightstands, windowsills, and bookshelves.  Use them often and display them with pride.