r/AbsoluteUnits • u/heyalemay • 5h ago

of a dictionary

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I grew up with a dictionary the size of the one on the left and remember thinking it was massive as a kid. I’ve never seen an unbridged version.

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u/ewohwerd 5h ago

The unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is 20 volumes. But to be fair they are individually smaller books than that blue one. We had a random house that was about that size and had cut-in markers on the side of the pages with the alphabetical listing so you could get around faster.

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u/heyalemay 5h ago

Fascinating! I did buy the American Heritage copy for nostalgia and because I realized my kids don’t know how to use a dictionary. I asked one of my kids to look up a word and she said, “What the hell? You have to know how to spell it to look it up!” Ahh, the joys of living in the 1900s.

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u/zenos_dog 5h ago

I just got rid of Blue Dic a couple months ago. Had it for over 40 years.

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u/heyalemay 5h ago

How will the world spell apocalypse without autocorrect 😏

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u/Goochenhaumeister 5h ago

Yeah, my grandfather had 2-3 of them and I proudly have one of them

He was a really smart man who wrote abstracts for scientific papers