Thomas Jefferson Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage.
But that word may fail to appear in a particular dictionary published at a particular time because it is too new, or too specialized, or too localized, or too much confined to a particular social group to make it into that edition of the dictionary. Trask he familiar notion that a word of English exists only if it is 'in the dictionary' is false.
Stephen Frye A dictionary is an observatory, not a conservatory.
Looking under a 'hood,' we should ordinarily have found, five hundred years ago, a monk today, we find a motorcar engine. In choosing our words when we speak or write, we can be guided by the historical record afforded us by the dictionary, but we cannot be bound by it. If, for example, we had been writing a dictionary in 1890, or even as late as 1919, we could have said that the word 'broadcast' means 'to scatter' (seed, for example), but we could not have decreed that from 1921 on, the most common meaning of the word should become 'to disseminate audible messages, etc., by radio transmission.' To regard the dictionary as an 'authority,' therefore, is to credit the dictionary writer with gifts of prophecy which neither he nor anyone else possesses. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver. is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the 'true meanings' of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one's ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past.
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