Dictionaries for children are an odd enterprise. They are supposed to be about definitions but they contain words like “day” and “sick,” which I can’t imagine any child looking up for meaning, and they tend not to contain the words that a child might encounter in reading and really want defined, such as “sieve” (in The Tale of Peter Rabbit), “sleuth” (in Nancy Drew), or “gnomon” (in The Mouse and His Child.)

In my memory of elementary school there was always a contrast between the teacher’s view of the dictionary and our own. Teachers had the mystifying idea that you could use the dictionary to find out how words were spelled. This was fine if you already knew the spelling but useless if you didn’t, so it confirmed our suspicions that in school it was better to know the answer before you researched the question.

To us dictionaries had two uses. The first was divination. We flipped through the pages and pointed to a word at random. This word, when interpreted, predicted the future or perhaps provided lexicographical ammunition in the various battles of our lives. The other use of the dictionary was, of course, to look up naughty words. The highly selective Winston Dictionary for Schools wasn’t much use in this latter quest.

In my observations of dictionary use in the library, not much has changed. With spell-check the role of the dictionary as spelling aid has disappeared and the Oxford English Dictionary. in the adult reference room tends to fall open at a particular page in the Fs. Our only consistent juvenile users of the dictionary are children in French immersion who consult the French dictionary and ESL high school students who are assiduous dictionary users.

In My First Canadian Oxford Dictionary Oxford Canada has pushed the envelope of early dictionary use, marketing the volume for children aged five and up. My First Canadian looks very jolly. It has energetic coloured pictures of donkeys, canoes, and fingers (rendering somewhat redundant the definition of fingers as “the five long thin parts at the end of your hand”). The alphabet that runs down the edge of each page is a sensible addition: Many’s the time I’ve hummed the alphabet song to myself in the heat of a search. Best of all are the definitions and context sentences. They express meanings in just the way you would really talk to a child. “Care: If you care for something like a pet you look after it.” The authors do a good job with more complex notions too. I liked the definition of art: “Art is something special that someone has made, like a drawing, painting or carving.” The dictionary even includes “sex” although in a carefully snigger-free definition: “The sexes are two groups that all people and animals belong to. One group is male and the other is female.”

The book is obviously based very much on the English Oxford Children’s Dictionary and it retains something of a British flavour: “Dance: When you dance you move about in time to music.” Canadian children are more likely to move around than about. But the Canadian-ness of the work comes through not only in the words defined, such as loonie (not, alas, toque), but in the context sentences: “Border: the border between the United States and Canada goes through the middle of Lake Huron.” It has some illustrations by our own Mark Thurman and it is unapologetic about Canadian spelling. I can see that primary school kids might well be enticed by this book. Whether or not they would actually use it as a dictionary is debatable. But it probably doesn’t matter. They might start to get the hang of using a dictionary even while subjecting it to their own anarchic purposes.

But it’s considerably less probable that young readers would get much out of Oxford’s companion volume, My First Canadian Oxford Thesaurus. A thesaurus for a five-year-old strikes me as being rather like a purple plastic toy I once saw called Baby’s First Saxophone. A thesaurus is a sophisticated tool. With the standard Roget, for example, you can search for an elusive word using two approaches. You can work forward through Roget’s ambitious and slightly dotty classification system from physics through light through opaqueness to that word you have been looking for – turbidity. Or you can work backward, looking in the index under muddiness.

Realizing quite rightly that both these approaches are beyond a primary age student, the editors of My First Canadian use a straight alphabetic arrangement and an index that consists of only the words that are already used as headwords. It does not really, therefore, introduce children to the way a thesaurus works.

In the introduction the editors suggest that children’s writing will be improved by the use of this tool, that they will learn to use more varied and precise words than “nice,” “big,” and “said.” As a veteran of many children’s writing workshops, I disagree. This artificial approach to writing enrichment produces only artifical writing, sometimes comically so. To foster better writing we need to immerse young children in a rich soup of language by reading aloud and by telling stories. A child who has heard “The great big enormous turnip” or “The little small wee tiny man” is building an internal thesaurus. Although this first thesaurus is imaginatively illustrated and has very good child-accessible definitions, the idea is ill-conceived. Wait until their hands are big enough for a real saxophone. For now, buy them a collection of stories rather than a thesaurus.