The Problem with Dictionaries

Dictionaries Aren’t Always Right

In a continuing quest to point out the inconsistencies and problems with dictionaries, I wanted to bring to light something I stumbled across the other day. My wife and I were doing crosswords, and she asked me about a clue regarding fish. Asp was the answer, and it surprised me because I knew asp to be a snake native to Egypt. I looked it up in the dictionary though, and the first two I checked didn’t list the fish.

Knowing that dictionaries aren’t always right, I continued and found a few other references that did list it. But that’s not why I’m writing this. What prompted me to write this was a few of the definitions of asp describing the snake. I’ve included the definitions below.

Cambridge
Asp:

a small poisonous snake found especially in North Africa, which was a symbol of royalty in ancient Egypt

Longman Dictionary
Asp:

a small poisonous snake from North Africa

I realize that many of you look at that definition and think it’s fine, but please look again. Both of them describe the asp as a “small poisonous snake,” when in fact it is a venomous snake. There is only one poisonous snake; the others are venomous (the ones often thought of as poisonous). To learn more about the difference between poisonous and venomous, see this article.

My complaint is that dictionaries are supposed to be a reference that can be relied on, but I have found too many instances (like this) where they fail to hold up. As we already know — dictionaries aren’t always right.

To be fair, several dictionaries did list the definition properly. Merriam Webster’s listed asp like this:

a small venomous snake . . .

The American Heritage Dictionary showed it as:

Any of several venomous snakes, especially the viper Vipera aspis of southern Europe, the cobra Naja haje of Africa and the Middle East, or the horned viper.

I wanted to see if asp was a rarity, so I looked up rattlesnake and others, but found the same thing. Some dictionaries had them listed as poisonous and others didn’t.

Dictionaries are not only supposed to be reliable references, they should offer good explanations of words, but all too often, the definitions they offer leave a person as befuddled as when they began their search. You’d think with all the talent employed by the publishers that put out these books they could define things easier, but it’s not the case. It remains one of the problems with dictionaries.

I’ll explain more in future articles. In the meantime, you can find answers to grammar questions in my book Simply Put: The Plain English Grammar Guide.