When I went to college, I took a linguistics class because my advisor thought I might like it. He knew I was a lover of words. He also knew that if I randomly won a truckload of cash, I'd buy my own set of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). Turns out, I loved the Intro to Linguistics course, and then I loved all of the other courses I took for the minor.
Both for fun and for class presentations, I read The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. I loved them both. I would suggest that anyone who loves the making of dictionaries, especially the OED, read these. These two books fueled my love of words. They also push us think about how we choose which words are important to us, how some words were burnt to a crisp in a stove, and how other people choose what is important to us without even our knowledge.
