They make dictionaries with the x most common words, and then there are unabridged dictionaries.

I always thought they should do the opposite: a dictionary with only the rare words.

Do I really need a dictionary to tell me what "down" means?

Anyone at that level of english is not using a dictionary. So who is the target audience?

Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is a great dictionary filled with just the words we mess up (either through spelling or usage). I'm a word geek & find it interesting just to flip around reading entries.

http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Modern-American-Usage/dp/01...

A good dictionary will give you more than a definition. Maybe you want to know the etymology of the word.

Quite true. But most of those a quite large.

I own one: http://www.amazon.com/Websters-Encyclopedic-Unabridged-Dicti... it's very big, and heavy.

But something smaller, with just hard words, for when you are reading a book would be nice.

I'm down with that. :)

Do I really need a dictionary to tell me what "down" means? Dunno. Depends on whether you might have forgotten that as well as "in the direction of gravity" it also means "small soft feathers" and "small round hill", or that in the first of those senses it has an associated verb to describe knocking people down or consuming a drink quickly and a bunch of metaphorical uses (e.g., "away from Cambridge University" or "depressed"). Or whether you have any interest in knowing the etymology of any of these, or when they entered the language, or how they relate to one another.

I use dictionaries about as often for looking up common words as for looking up obscure ones.

I use online dictionaries when reading Jack Vance books. I don't think they are obsolete at all - printed ones are.

Bingo!

I totally don't understand why people hold this divide online/offline in their heads. Things aren't online or offline. Everything(for approx values of everything) is moving online. Dictionaries dead? No, moving online. Newspapers dead? No, moving online. Social discourse dead? No, moving online.

What's dying are people / companies with heads in sand vainly and stupidly trying to prevent/slow that move to online. But that's not a sensational, advertiser friendly title.

btw best dictionary I've found http://definr.com/dictionary

Dictionaries are not obsolete. Google is just a really kick ass dictionary.

I think the article perhaps means to say printed dictionaries are obsolete in the face of the new technology.

Spelling is obsolete. I don't even attempt to spell search queries correctly much of the time anymore. As long as you don't get caught by an accidental heteronym you are good to go.

I don't need to read this to know that dictionaries are not obsolete. I love the The New Oxford American Dictionary that comes with my Mac. I use it constantly.

No mention in the article that you can just do a "define keyword" in google and get the definition from a couple dozen dictionaries and in any language.

Noah Webster's 1828 or 1913 edition. Nothing else really compares here; in that time America was in many ways a more literate nation.

http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters

Also the OED on CD, I wish somebody would make the OED web-friendly.

paper is obsolete.

People have been saying that for 30 years.

It's not. Not yet. We get closer each year, but we are not there yet, not by a longshot.

Getting pretty close now though.

People always complain that the 'paperless office' never happened but for me it did - I don't have a single piece of paper on my desk right now. Hell I don't even own a pen. All our invoices are sent to clients via email only. I don't get snailmail from my bank, my utilities, my internet supplier, my phone company, nor my family. All electronic. I don't read the papers in dead-tree format. I don't get junk mail.

Right now I can't really think of anything I'd miss if I decided not to touch another piece of paper for the rest of the month.

Until the power goes out.

At which point a dictionary probably wouldn't be the first thing on your mind.

I don't think I'd immediately launch into a state of panic during a mid-summer brownout...I'd probably be even more likely to read, which is a time it's nice to have a thorough dictionary on hand. Also, I don't like the idea of being separated from references just because Comcast's screwing up again...maybe I still think like a student.

My phone's battery will last at least another 10 hours.