Back to previous page AT RANDOM: ON LANGUAGE Dictionary author really did research to the letter By Nathan Bierma Special to the Tribune November 2, 2005 Four-letter words are not in short supply, as you know when you stub your toe. But one-letter words? What are there -- two or three of them? Try 1,000, says Craig Conley, author of "One-Letter Words: A Dictionary" (HarperCollins, 272 pages, $16.95). "Upon being told about my dictionary, the average person will laugh in disbelief, then -- certain that I must be joking -- ask just how many one-letter words there could possibly be," Conley writes in his introduction. "Nine out of ten people will guess that there are just two: the pronoun `I' and the article `a.' ... It's when I retort that there are 1,000 one-letter words that wagers get made, and won." Since Merriam-Webster defines "word" as "a speech sound ... that symbolizes and communicates a meaning," individual letters do indeed qualify. "So even though there are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, my research shows that they stand for 1,000 distinct units of meaning," Conley writes. Conley, who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., and identifies himself at his Web site as "a curator, benefactor, philosopher, author, music producer, and documentarian," shows that "X" alone has more than 70 meanings (including a mark on a treasure map; an incorrect answer; a symbol for multiplication; a rating for an adult movie; an axis on a graph; a chromosome; a kiss in a letter; and even a virus called "x-disease.") Conley's inspiration, he writes, came in part in "a fit of procrastination" in graduate school, when he decided to look up the entries for each letter in the dictionary and found them lacking. He posted an earlier edition of his dictionary at his Web site, www.blueray.com, dedicated to the White Queen from "Through the Looking Glass," who exclaimed to Alice, "I can read words of one letter!" Only by browsing "One-Letter Words" does the reader begin to appreciate the work letters do as verbal units. For instance, Conley's more than 20 entries for "A" include "the beginning" -- as in "from A to Z"; "precursor," as when Tom Wolfe writes of "the notion that A in the past caused B in the present"; "per," as in "60 cents a dozen"; "certain one," as in, "A Mr. Po called"; "another," as in, "A Mona Lisa in beauty"; and, of course, a brassiere cup size. Although it's an unconventional reference book, "One-Letter Words" has a handsome, formal appearance, including a specially designed font for the elegant capital letters at the corner of each page. The book's entries are marked for part of speech and annotated with examples from literature and popular culture. "My book can serve as a browsing dictionary of interesting facts, but it's also a serious overview of our language at play," Conley writes by e-mail. "One-letter words are too-often overlooked, lost among their larger counterparts in a sentence.... My book is a serious reference manual for people looking to find the meaning of a one-letter word when their traditional dictionaries fail them," he writes. "It's a testament to the power of the alphabet that each letter can have so many meanings, from the evocative to the workaday," says Erin McKean, Chicago-based editor in chief of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press. McKean published an earlier version of Conley's introduction in Verbatim, a quarterly magazine she edits. Conley has other volumes in progress at his Web site under the category of "Strange and Unusual Dictionaries," including "Dictionary of All-Consonant Words" and "The Dictionary of All-Vowel Words." Endings: "Call off," "close down," "drop by," "lash out," "own up" and "take after" are among the entries in "The American Heritage Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs" (Houghton Mifflin, 480 pages, $19.95). The AHD editors have also published the third edition of "The American Heritage Dictionary of Abbreviations" (Houghton Mifflin, 294 pages, $6.95). The book's 20,000-plus entries come from sources such as classified ads, business memos, shortwave radio, and text messaging, and range from "ALLSA," for the Allergy Society of South Africa, to "ZRL," for "zero risk level." ... Oak Park-based Marion Street Press has issued a new breed of thesaurus with a snooty name: "The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words" (Marion Street Press, 460 pages, $29.95), by Peter Meltzer. The book aims to "offer interesting (rather than mundane) words as synonyms, and ... explain them so the reader would not be embarrassed by using the synonym incorrectly." The entry for "incontrovertible," for instance, suggests "apodictic," with a paragraph-long explanation of its precise meaning, and a recent example from a newspaper. While many alternatives will be too obscure for you to drop into dinner-party conversation ("perfervid" instead of "impassioned"? "antediluvian" instead of "outdated"?), one of the most distinctive features of the book is its use of proper names as synonyms, such as "Micawber" (a Dickens character) for "optimist," and "between Scylla and Charybdis" for "in a predicament." Marion Street Press, which specializes in writing guides, has also released "The Wrong Word Dictionary: 2,000 Most Commonly Confused Words" (Marion Street Press, 237 pages, $14.95). ---------- Write to Nathan Bierma at onlanguage@gmail.com Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune Back to previous page

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