The OED is excellent for this purpose, due to its completeness, and other, even “unabridged” dictionaries fall far short of it in this use.
Of course, you have to a pretty particular needs in words to look up to be frequently hitting the space where the OED is needed for this.
But unlike most everyone here, I'm acknowledging that the value I get from the OED is purely entertainment value, not utility.
I'll note also that it obviously cannot be true that "many, many people" find the OED useful, as the total number of people who access the OED more than a couple of times a year is less than "many, many".
I don't access an optometrist more than once a year.
I find optometry very, very useful to me. Frequency of access and value derived from a thing have no necessary relationship.
The premise of this comment is that everyone must agree with it (they just aren't admitting it). I'm sure there's a word for that ...
I couldn't disagree more strongly. I use it to learn the meanings of words and there is no better source:
What I really love about the OED is how it keeps getting better even in its coverage of old words. There are lots of words which ten or twenty years ago had the etymology given us "unknown" but which now have a detailed explanation, thanks to recent research. (If you want an example, I think the word "koala" is one.)
That's simply not true. The OED has the current meanings, in more depth than anyone else.
> That question is relevant to almost no one.
Also not true. Most books and other texts were written before 2018.
The printed OED does not, though there have been separate print supplements to the print edition that get it closer.
The online edition, OTOH, does.
Tangentially, is there a better use case for moving to a database than 20+ volumes of books? To put it another way, if someone had a database and said, 'hey, let's print this thing out - it will be around 20 large books - and sell it!' ...
It is just chaotic is all I could infer from a first look. I mean English can be pretty messy already and maybe a specific Chinese dialect will be more regular than the bigger picture of the whole language. It's not that your coeds were being cheap, perhaps, it could just be disappointment for something as basic to cost anything at all, and relieve that it's not their personal shortcoming, but just an externalized advantage. You seem to say not even $20 was low enough, have I got that right at least?
Standard written Chinese is based on the grammar of spoken Mandarin. If someone mentions a Chinese dictionary without mentioning a particular dialect, they're almost certainly referring to Standard Written Chinese (essentially Mandarin).
Also, Chinese is less a single language than the Romance languages are a single language. The more far-flung dialects share less in common than, say Italian and Spanish. If Portugal were a province of Spain, Portuguese would probably be considered a dialect of Spanish. As my Linguistics professor used to say, "A language is a dialect with an army." One rarely deals with "the whole Chinese language", if by that you mean the union of all of the dialects. That would be like dealing simultaneously with Romanian, Portuguese, Romansh, French, Italian and Spanish as a single entity.
Dictionaries are not basic in the slightest. I'm constantly frustrated that the state of the art in Chinese/English dictionaries is still not very good.
Here's an example. The Mandarin word for "protect" is 保护 bǎohù. As a matter of semantics, protecting involves three roles: (1) the protector; (2) the beneficiary; (3) a danger to be warded off. In English, (1) is marked by being the subject of the verb protect, (2) is marked by being the object, and (3) is optionally marked by being the object of a complementary prepositional phrase headed by from: in
1E. I will protect her from going hungry.
A quality dictionary will include all of that information if you look up protect. But the state of the art in Chinese/English dictionaries is to note that 保护 is a verb, that it means "protect", and to provide a few example sentences, none of which feature role (3) at all. I had to ask a Chinese person how to indicate the danger involved in protecting, which it turns out is marked by an entire complementary clause:
1Z: 我保护她免挨饿 wǒ bǎohù tā miǎn ái'è
There are a couple of problems with this.
First, the OED is primarily a work of historical scholarship. Anyone in the market for a dictionary so that they can look up the meanings of words would be better off getting something else, like Merriam-Webster or really anything. The OED is not a good choice for this purpose.
Second, a story: I spent a semester studying Chinese in a foreign student program at a Chinese school. Like everybody else, I used Pleco for my dictionary needs.
My friends in the class quickly noticed that I was getting much better dictionary value from my installation of Pleco than they were getting from theirs. When one of them asked how I was doing it, I responded "I bought for-pay dictionaries" and they immediately lost interest.
There was no need for me to assert that the dictionaries I was using were superior and valuable -- my friends had already come to that conclusion themselves by watching me. They just weren't willing to pay $20 for that additional value.