What’s the difference between a Dictionary and a Thesaurus?

Dedicated to Diana Irwin, who taught me some essential lessons of life, for example, capitalizing the word “I.”

The joke in the title is one that I’m in the process of making up. It doesn’t have a punch line yet. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Another Short Story About My Dictionary: (see blog post “Animal Poop” for the first dictionary story)

Once, I brought my dictionary to class and had students look up vocabulary words as part of the lesson. One of my students wanted to find out how to say a word in English, so he volunteered to search in the dictionary. I handed it to him, glad for his eagerness to participate, although most kids are usually pretty excited to touch the dictionary.

But after about ten minutes, he stood up in exasperation.

“Desconsegui.” I give up.

I tried to point him in the right direction. I asked him which word in Portuguese he was looking for, then glanced at the page he was on. He was looking in the ‘a’ section. Clearly he was not on the right track.

“Ok, does ‘m’ come before or after ‘a’? Good. Find the words that start with ‘m.’ Great job. Now find the words that start with ‘mo.’ You got it.” After these few words of explanation and encouragement, I went back to talking with the rest of my class.

After a couple more minutes, he seemed to have stopped flipping through pages.

“Did you find your word?”

“Yes.”

I felt relieved. I hadn’t realized that students wouldn’t know how to use alphabetical order, never mind look up a word in the dictionary, and I couldn’t find the right words to explain in Portuguese.

He came hesitantly up to the board and wrote with the chalk for a minute, erased a couple letters, peeked in the dictionary, wrote again, thought for a minute, erased again, added on some more letters. Finally he stepped away so I could admire his achievment.

Monkey.

I internally raised one eyebrow, but tried not to let him see it. “Thank you. You may sit down.”

After all that, what was the word he was trying to translate from Portuguese to English?

Mosquito.

It’s the same in both languages.

Teodosio consults the dictionary to look up a mystery word that he 

found in Pippi Longstocking