People learn to read well, and get big vocabularies, from books, not workbooks and dictionaries. As a kid I read years ahead of my age, but I never looked up words in dictionaries, and didn't even have a dictionary. In my lifetime I don't believe I have looked up even as many as fifty words-neither have most good readers.

Most people don't know how dictionaries are made. Each new dictionary starts from scratch. The company making the dictionary employs thousands of "editors", to each of whom they give a list of words. The job of the editor is to collect as many examples as possible of the way in which these words are actually used. They look for the words in books, magazines, newspapers, and so forth, and every time they find one, they cut out or copy that particular example, building up a file of clippings where the word has been used. Then reading these files, they decide from the context what the writer in each case had meant by the words. From these they make the definitions. A dictionary, in other words, is a collection of people's opinions about what words mean as other people use them.

I browsed through elt.emacmillan.com today. I must congratulate you on this wonderful feat. Everything that I always wanted to see in an English teacher's website (the idea is so new, too!) I found at this site. I would like to respond to John Holt's view on referring to a dictionary.

I feel learning meanings in context is good but referring to a dictionary has its own advantages. When I ran into the word enigma in context, I thought it could only be used with reference to a person. When I ran into this word while browsing through the dictionary I learnt that it could also be used with reference to a thing, question or circumstance.

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