1.What exercise is to the body, reading is to the mind. There are different purposes of reading. One of them is deriving pleasure. Children reading for their pleasure rarely stop to ask about the words. They want to get on with the story. If the word is important, they can usually make a good guess about what it is. “He drew an arrow from his quiver”. Easy to see that a quiver is some sort of gadget to put arrows in. More complicated words they figure out by meeting them in different contexts. People learn to read well and get good vocabulary, from books, not work books or dictionaries. 2. As a kid I read years ahead of my age, but I never looked up words in dictionaries, and didn’t even have a dictionary. In my lifetime I don’t believe I have looked at even as many as fifty words – neither have most good readers. Most people don’t know how dictionaries are made. 3.Each new dictionary starts from scratch. The company making the dictionary employs thousands of ‘editors’, to each of whom they give a list of words. The job of the editor is to collect as many examples as possible of the ways in which these words are actually used. They look for the words in books, newspapers, and so forth and every time they find one, they cut out or copy that particular example. 4.Then after reading these examples they decide ‘from the context’ what the writer in each case had meant by the words. From these they make definitions. A dictionary in other words, is a collection of