The Subtle Resistance of Dictionary.com

Can you use "context" in a sentence?

There’s something pretty interesting happening on Dictionary.com and its sister site, Thesaurus.com. Scroll down to the example usages of a given word and you’ll see what I mean. Among the example sentences for “democracy” at time of publication:

“It seems this 248-year-old experiment we call American democracy may very well rest in the hands of our highly politicized Supreme Court.”

Let’s try another word. How about “fascism?”

“One demonstrator told Salon last week that Schumer’s vote was a sign the minority leader was ‘capitulating to fascism.’”

“Diplomacy”?

“The president's belief in the power of his personal, one-on-one diplomacy may have been misplaced.”

These sentences are taken from writing in the public sphere—the sources of the above are, respectively, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, and the BBC, which seem to be the sites’ preferred outlets. No one can say Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com aren’t doing what any of their namesakes do: demonstrating word use in contemporary context. But we here at The Contrarian can’t help noticing a pleasantly surprising trend in their sentence selection.

Example sentence for “security”:

“In his original article, Mr Goldberg reports that on 11 March he initially ‘received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz’, Trump’s national security adviser.”

The sites are one of those bedrock online resources dating from the 1990s, and are visited by more than 40 million users a month according to their current owner, education conglomerate IXL (which also owns Rosetta Stone and “Education.com” among other legacy resources). Nothing about the on-site or social media branding of Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com suggests anything other than the staid neutrality of a digital reference section. And yet—somewhere along the way, it seems, a pro-democracy ghost got into the machine. And whoever that ghost is has taken charge of the example sentences.

Example sentence for “liberty”:

“Critics say that Trump, like Bukele, invokes crime as an excuse for suspending civil liberties.”

Example sentence for “loyalty”:

“[The Cabinet appointees’] ‘qualifications’ are loyalty to Trump and a willingness to do whatever he commands even if it violates the law and the Constitution.”

Over the past two months but also in a years-long encroachment, Trump, Musk and the GOP establishment have demonstrated what it is to censor, coopt, and impoverish language for undemocratic ends. They crow about the first amendment and support “Don’t Say Gay.” They campaign on complaints about the “woke language police” and then scrub government resources of references to DEI. They talk about government “efficiency” when what they mean is destruction of jobs, norms, data, laws.

Example sentence for “migration”:

“[The Venezuelan deportees’] predicament, activists say, highlights the erosion of democracy across the region, as well as the dramatic crackdown on migration pushed by Washington.”

What Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are doing is more than just laughing in the dark about all this, though I suspect there is a bit of that (and why not?). It’s also an assertion, to me, that however hard would-be autocrats try to take over the commons of public discourse—they can buy the town square, intimidate the media, starve the universities, purge the public records—they still won’t own the tools with which ideas are made and exchanged. Words are for everyone, defined and redefined only through the democratic process of usage over time.

Example sentence for “empathy”:

“‘I agree,’ Newsom eagerly nodded, referring to a president who has demonstrated countless times his empathy could easily fit inside a thimble, leaving plenty of room to spare.”

Don’t let the shadow of tyranny recast our language in its own image. Use it how they can’t and won’t: freely, with variety and precision. And if you forget what anything means, you know where to look it up.