Thumb dirt.

When I began tutoring French in London in 2010, I took a French-English dictionary to every lesson. Most of my students had one of their own as well.  

I told them “My dictionary bears the unmistakable mark of 'thumb dirt' - the result of countless hours spent looking up words. Yours should too”. My aim was to encourage using dictionaries to learn new words, although the message was somewhat lost on one young pupil who later revealed that she had spent the previous week thumbing through her dictionary while watching TV, hoping to shortcut the process of building up her own thumb dirt. “At least it wasn’t gathering dust on the bookshelf”, I consoled myself. 

With the advent of online tools, however, paper dictionaries fell largely out of favour, much to my dad’s dismay (a traditionalist at heart, he much prefers the feel and reliability of the paper variety). Online dictionaries offer audio pronunciations, up-to-date slang, and modern usage examples. They fit comfortably in your pocket and can be summoned in seconds to decipher an obscure ingredient on a menu or a food label in the supermarket. Better still, they don’t weigh as much as four pints of milk, as my principal paper dictionary does, and which I once had to lug to and from France in my luggage when I lived there. 

Yet for all the speed and convenience of modern technology, the old adage may still hold true: slow and steady wins the race. A 2022 study identified that looking up a word in an online dictionary takes only a few seconds, meaning the word often remains in short-term memory. Conversely, using a paper dictionary gives learners more time to engage with the word and mentally rehearse it while searching, which can help strengthen retention and support its transfer into long-term memory. 

As for me, I have reluctantly embraced online dictionaries, so these days the dirt from my fingers is more likely to smudge my iPhone screen or find its way onto my keyboard than the pages of a dictionary. Sorry Dad.