When I began work on The Yale Book of Quotations for Yale University Press in 2000, I was certain that I could improve upon the standard quotation dictionaries--Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and The ...

Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed. Useful though they are, the vast majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias are poker-faced pieces of work that stick to the facts and ...

“Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.” –Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic’s Word ...

At first glance, spending $50 or so on a CD-ROM edition of a dictionary, book of quotations or other reference book seems like the classic case of fixing something that isn’t broken. Up until the ...