For years, we here at Dictionary.com have been working on a pretty ambitious project. We’ve been compiling a list of words that people use in the English language, and for each word that we add to the list, we write a few sentences about what it means. (A neat thing is that some of the words mean more than one thing.)
A cool feature about the list is that you can use this website to look up any word on the list on a whim, which is how most people use it after they encounter a word they don’t know, such as when talking to a smarter friend or reading a book (so that they can be the smarter friend).
Another cool thing about the list is that we’ve ranked every single word! We figured the fairest and most logical way to rank the words was in alphabetical order. This way you can browse through the list from start to finish.
At this point you may have realized that this all sounds like an April Fools’ joke, which it is, but everything we’ve said is true (which is the best kind of April Fools’ joke, or the least worst kind). Yes, the gag is that we just defined what a dictionary is as if it didn’t already exist, which is our way of reminding you how weird and awesome and kind of hilarious it is that dictionaries do exist. (A list of all words and what they mean? Lol who do we think we are, stewards of language?)
We hope you’ve enjoyed this joke and our explanation of it (everyone has always reassuringly told us that the funniest kind of jokes are the ones that need to be explained).
Now that you’re here, you might as well stay awhile where you know you’ll be safe from all the foolery and nonsense that’s happening everywhere else except this exact website, which you have to admit has a very straightforward and no-nonsense name.
Like we said, you can look up words one at a time, or you can start with the letter A and browse your way through the dictionary, all the way to the letter Z. We promise everything you’ll read is true. (Except for the mountweazels, obviously.)
And if you get through all that, check out our other website, WordsThatYouCanUseInsteadOfOtherWords.com (we’re trying to think of a better name).
Correction: The headline of this article promises, a bit disingenuously, a list of every word we know of. While it’s true that our dictionary is “unabridged” (we never write definitions while on bridges), it doesn’t exactly include every word we know of. We don’t add every word to the dictionary, and there are some words we simply haven’t had a chance to add yet (we have to spend at least some time on bridges). But we all agreed that you probably wouldn’t have clicked the headline if we had included this disclaimer in it, and also it would have been too long.
