Quotations about legal dictionaries
Of course it is true that the words used, even in their literal sense, are the primary, and ordinarily the most reliable, source of interpreting the meaning of any writing: be it a statute, a contract, or anything else. But it is one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress out of the dictionary; but to remember that statutes always have some purpose or object to accomplish, whose sympathetic and imaginative discovery is the surest guide to their meaning.
– Learned Hand, Cabell v. Markham, 148 F. 2d 737, 739 (2nd Cir. 1945).
A word generally has several meanings, even in the dictionary. You have to consider the sentence in which it stands to decide which of those meanings it bears in the particular case, and very likely will see that it there has a shade of significance more refined than any given in the wordbook.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Theory of Legal Interpretation, 12 Harvard Law Review 417, 417 (1899).
Ordinarily, a word’s usage accords with its dictionary definition. In law as in life, however, the same words, placed in different contexts, sometimes mean different things.
– Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yates v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 1074, 1082 (2015).