By Philip Harber Volume 16 Number 3 People used to say of some
verbally precocious child that he or she had swallowed the
dictionary. Even if they only meant that it had been read from
cover to cover, the expression was a picturesque exaggeration,
since few people find the dictionary entertaining reading
matter. But a good encyclopedia? That's different. . . Even if
you only have volume I (A-And) of an out-of-date set, say of the
eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), you have
hours of profitable reading ahead of you and you will end up
with lots of trivia about things beginning with A. The easy way
to distinguish between dictionaries and encyclopedias is to read
them: the former are for quick reference and the latter are for
reading at greater length More strictly, Alain Rey* defines the
entries in an encyclopedia as words relating to things, and
entries in a dictionary as words relating to words (p. 20).
There are also exceptions and hybrids: encyclopedic dictionaries
in one volume like the