The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you've never heard of, or whose sense you're unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word -- like example, or sport, or magic -- because all you'll learn is what it means, and that you already know.
Indeed, if you look up those particular words in the dictionary that comes with your computer -- on my Mac, it's the New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd Edition -- you'll be rewarded with... well, there won't be any reward.
Here, words are boiled to their essence. But that essence is dry, functional, almost bureaucratically sapped of color or pop, like high modernist architecture. Which trains you to think of the dictionary as a utility, not a quarry of good things, not a place you'd go to explore and savor.
John McPhee -- one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist -- once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called "Draft #4." He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that's left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.
But somehow for McPhee, the dictionary -- the dictionary! -- was the fount of fine prose, the first place he'd go to filch a phrase, to steal fire from the gods.
Unfortunately, he never comes out and says exactly which dictionary he's getting all this juice out of. But I was desperate to find it. What was this secret book, this dictionary so rich and alive that one of my favorite writers was using it to make heroic improvements to his writing?
I did a little sleuthing. It wasn't so hard with the examples McPhee gives, and Google.