by Nick Broadhurst

Created on: November 27, 2009   Last Updated: March 27, 2010

When a person reads past words he does not understand he goes sleepy, goes blank on the reading material, and may eventually give up study of the subject. Words have meaning. Many words have more than one meaning. Going past a word or symbol has physiological affects on the mind as said.

So students need to address this phenomena with dictionaries. But dictionary can be daunting to many of us. Some students have even been taught at school that dictionaries are unnecessary, and that they should be able to work out what words mean only by context. This is false.

The children went quiet as the crepuscule approached. is a demonstration. You cannot derive the meaning of crepuscule from the sentence. It means twilight or darkness.

What do these following words really mean? Mathematics, science, physics, geography, and history?

If you could not recite a quick definition of them then there may be words you did not understand. If that is the case, then let me guess that you did poorly at school on that subject. Often students who perform poorly at mathematics cannot define its meaning.

Words have very precise meaning. To understand a subject you need to know what the subject means. But why is it important to be able to know words after you have left school?

If this world community is to expand peacefully, it needs to be able to communicate within itself. To do that we need words. To be able to use words you need to understand them. And to do that you need a reference book on words that we all agree upon a dictionary.

Mathematics means the science of numbers and shapes. Science means knowing or knowledge of something. Physics is the science dealing with the properties of the physical universe. Geography is the science dealing with the earth's surface. History simply means knowing, usually of the past.

Dictionaries have these definitions. Many words have more than one meaning. If you read a word, and think it means something else, will you understand the sentence? No. The bat went click, is such an example. Am I writing about a flying animal and the sounds it uses to tell direction, or am I writing about a sportsman? If a person only knows of the flying animal definition, then when he reads about the ball whistling past the bat he is likely to get the wrong meaning of the sentence.

So how do you use a dictionary to tell which meaning is in use?

A dictionary has listed the various different meanings of the word you are looking for. Look up the definition you think is used

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