Welcome to Writers Talkback. If you are a new user, your account will have to be approved manually to prevent spam. Please bear with us in the meantime
Poets and rhyming dictionaries
Do any of you regularly use a 'rhyming' dictionary? - I am considering whether I would find one useful and would welcome your comments. I have an online rhyming words resource that I use but I generally enjoy real live books for reference purposes.
Comments
I use Chambers but they've just discontinued it. It is the best. i use it almost every day. It wears out in a year. Very irritating.
Collins is next best, but not as easy to use.
Penguin is RUBBISH. Hardly any rhymes.
Liz!, kateyanne and Betsie - yes, you have confirmed that I need my own pet rhyming dictionary, I love books that you can dip into and find yourself transported off to all those little planets and tangents of ideas that somehow seem to bounce and deflect and expand from each other. Thanks all, I shall put one on my 'wish list'
Very nice to use.
Though I never seem to have one near
I'm sure if I could
My rhymes'd be good
Not rubbish like this, it's quite clear.
What a load of rubbish.
The words should come with what you're feeling. If you go looking in a dictionary it's superficial
Feelings can be expressed in a myriad of ways, if they couldn't there'd only be one poem. Are you suggesting a poem would be 'superficial' if an alternative, just as good, maybe even better word was used, simply because it hadn't been thought of first by the poet? If that is the case, forget editing, you might as well just throw any poem that isn't perfect in the bin straight away.
I often think of a word, then have look in a dictionary and find a better one which I hadn't thought of. If you are so arrogant as to think your vocabulary is that massive, that precise, always that accurate, always comes up with the best first thing, then your writing will suffer. If you are writing poetry, that is. With poetry every word counts so much that it has to be absolutely the right one, and maybe even a word that conveys more than one thing. You might want a word that means the same - but that has an initial letter or inner letters that suit the sound of your poem. Nothing is lost by having a look, you might stick with what you have. But if you don't look, you'll never know.
Very nice poem dora.
Mind you, I have to admit I often don't find anything better/more suitable than the word I've put in the first place.
[/quote]
Have to disagree with you BM - when one's brain becomes aged like mine you're glad of a few prompts - you really do lose words as you get older - I'm sure you'll discover this for yourself one day. You don't lose them completely but it takes longer to winkle them out from the depths of addled grey matter.
And we have active and passive vocabularies.
[/quote]
I'm sooo glad it's not just me having to winkle out words ;-) I love dictionaries (and will sit and read one if denied other reading matter) so have two plus a thesaurus at home and one of each (plus medical ones) at work. My rhyming dictionary is the back half of Frances Stillman's 'The Poet's Manual and Rhyming Dictionary' - bit old fashioned as it was first published in 1966, but suits me and the manual bit comes in handy if I need to write something to a set form.
I don't read a thesaurus, Jay, in fact only very occaisionally, when writing non-creative things.
I never said the first word is always the best, I said any word you can think of.
As for personal vocabulary, your vocabulary tends to match your feelings at the time, I find, and you think of words you didn't know you knew. For me anyway
You may disagree, of course, but I work by this viewpoint because it has served me pretty well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_vocabulary
But the thing is, you are looking in the dictionary for ONE word. It just has to be there.
By rubbish, I mean ease of use.