Meme: Vocabulary

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This question comes from Nithin on Booking Through Thursday:

I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?

I used to look them all up. I had a notebook I kept definitions written in, it was even alphabatized. I had a huge fat unabridged dictionary and I even marked the words with a little penciled box around them so I'd know if I'd already looked one up! A bit obsessive.

I don't look up most words anymore. I just figure them out from the context, or skim over. If a word sounds really interesting, or the meaning is important to the story, I'll jot it down to look up on dictionary.com. Or just ask my husband. He yells "what's this word mean?" more than I do, but half the time I re-direct him to the dictionary. Although just the other day I impressed him by using the word hasp in a sentence (part of a latch). It came out intuitively; after I'd said it I wasn't sure it was the right word. Until the next day installing the latch on the shed door I read the word hasp in the directions; so I knew then that I was right!

Incidentally, how many of you like visiting sites such as Free Rice that have vocabulary games? Or this one that tells origins of English words? I think my enjoyment of these sites has overtaken my use of a printed dictionary. And, as a funny note, I can't count the number of strange sites I've come across when mis-typing dictionary in order to look up a word online. It seems there's dozens of sites out there that thrive on people's inability to spell dictionary with their fingers!