June 15, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
Mary French knows from personal experience that children love dictionaries — she has been distributing them free to third graders in her home state of South Carolina for more than 10 years. But she has also learned just how much adults, even in this high-tech era, are attached to the humble reference book.
Five years ago, Ms. French was struggling to find money for her small nonprofit group, the Dictionary Project, in Charleston. She called The Wall Street Journal to try to get some publicity — and opened the floodgates.
After the newspaper published an article in spring 2002 about the “Dictionary Lady,” Ms. French was deluged with e-mail messages from people across the country who wanted to follow her example. Money started rolling in too — $50,000 in response to that article alone, she says.
One of those who read the article was Barry Graynor, a lawyer in San Francisco.
“When I was growing up, I always had a dictionary,” he says. “It never occurred to me that there are children that had no access to dictionaries.”
After contacting Ms. French, he helped start the California Dictionary Project — whose motto is “Today a Reader, Tomorrow a Leader.”
The California effort is one of more than 4,000 dictionary projects that have popped up in all 50 states since the Wall Street Journal article appeared, many of them run by local groups such as Rotary or Kiwanis Clubs or literacy organizations.
Last year, the budget for Ms. French’s charity, which has become an umbrella group for dictionary projects, was $2-million, a big leap from the $75,000 it raised in 2001.
The groups distributed more than 1.5 million dictionaries this school year — reaching about half of all third graders in the United States, Ms. French says.
