What’s a Hotel?

A colleague recently asked me, “Aren’t all large dictionaries pretty much the same?”

As Sen. Stevens famously said, “No!”

Dictionaries aren’t “pretty much the same” at all. Take, for example, a word with which we’re all familiar: hotel.

If you were to look it up in The New Oxford American Dictionary, you’d learn that a hotel is an establishment providing accommodations, meals, and other services for travelers and tourists.

Most readers would probably agree that this is a fine definition.

But Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines hotel quite differently:

a building of many rooms chiefly for overnight accommodation of transients and several floors served by elevators, usually with a large open street-level lobby containing easy chairs, with a variety of compartments for eating, drinking, dancing, exhibitions, and group meetings (as of salesmen or convention attendants) with shops having both inside and street-side entrances and offering for sale items (as clothes, gifts, candy, theater tickets, travel tickets) of particular interest to a traveler, or providing personal services (as hairdressing, shoe shining) and with telephone booths, writing tables, and washrooms freely available.

If you prefer one of these definitions over the other, you’ll agree with me that dictionaries aren’t all pretty much the same.