Grammar Girl here, today we're going to talk about dictionaries, what therefore and how words get into them.

It's more controversial than you might think.

Last week, the New York Times had an interesting article about Supreme Court justices

citing dictionary definitions in their rulings, more often than they have in the past.

The most concerning part of the article was that justices have cited more than 120 different dictionaries,

which suggests they might be cherry picking to find definitions that suit their own purposes.

And 120 dictionaries? Who knew there even were 120 different dictionaries?

Well, the article doesn't say, but it could be that justices are citing specialized dictionaries

that cover just words related to medicine or international business, for example.

And we do know that sometimes judges look at old dictionaries.

For example, in constitutional cases they sometimes do so, to see if the meaning of a word was different back when the law was written.

Even if you're not considering specialized dictionaries, more dictionaries exist than you probably realize.

For example, most publishers release dictionaries of varying levels of completeness.

There are short dictionaries for children and inexpensive pocket dictionaries that don't have many words.

And unabridged or collegiate dictionary will have more words.

And the largest Oxford English dictionary comes as a 20 volume set.

It's going to include words other dictionaries don't have, such as words that aren't used much, if at all anymore.

For example, you're probably familiar with the word feckless.

It's an adjective that means ineffective or incompetent.

Well, it has an antonym, feckful, which you probably haven't heard because it doesn't used much.

You won't find feckfulindictionary.com or on the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, but you will find it in the Oxford English Dictionary.

A lot of people think dictionaries are like rule books, and that dictionary writers make judgments about acceptable and unacceptable words.

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