dictionaric

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Sat May 16 23:20:42 UTC 2009


Wiktionary has an entry for "dictionaric" as an adjectival form of
"dictionary" -- a form unrecorded in OED or any other print dictionary
I'm aware of:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dictionaric

It's tagged as "rare" with citations listed from 1902 to 2006 (the
last drawn from the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english). I'd say it's
exceedingly rare -- most of the Google Book Search results for
"dictionaric" are actually OCR errors for "dictionarie".

Despite its scant use in the past, the word is evidently being revived
by some Wikipedians as a counterpart to "encyclopedic". See, for
instance, the section on "Dealing with mis-placed dictionaric
articles" in the policy article "Wikipedia is not a dictionary":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_dictionary#Dealing_with_mis-placed_dictionaric_articles


--Ben Zimmer

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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