The idea for The Dictionary Project began in 1992 when Annie Plummer of Savannah, Georgia, gave 50 dictionaries to children who attended a school close to her home. Each year she continued to give this gift, raising money to help give more and more books so that in her lifetime she raised enough money to buy 17,000 dictionaries for children in Savannah. Early on, her project attracted the attention of Bonnie Beeferman of Hilton Head, S.C., who began a project of raising money by selling crafts to buy dictionaries for the schoolchildren of Hilton Head and the surrounding communities. By 1995, Bonnie was getting so many requests from local teachers to be included in the project that she wrote a letter to the editor of the Charleston, S. C., newspaper explaining the project and asking for someone to help meet the requests from the Charleston area. Mary French, who was already an active school volunteer even though her two children were still of preschool age, read the letter and decided this was a project for her. Starting with a few schools in Charleston and Summerville, she realized quickly that providing dictionaries to all the students in Charleston was going to require serious fundraising. She and her husband Arno French formed a 501(c)(3) nonprofit Association in 1995, along with a Board of Directors. Arno served as president, Mary became the director of the Association, and The Dictionary Project was born.

Many people have implemented The Dictionary Project since then. Since 1995, over 12.5 million children have received dictionaries because thousands of people saw the same need in communities all over the United States.

The Board first set a goal to provide dictionaries to all of the third grade students in South Carolina each year. In 1997, they expanded their mission to include all of the students in the United States. The purpose of The Dictionary Project is to provide dictionaries to students to keep as their own personal reference books. A dictionary is an essential tool for a quality education. Most children do not own a dictionary, nor do they have access to one in their home. This agency seeks to provide dictionaries to all children while they are in school. The program is typically implemented in the third grade each year, since this is the age at which dictionary skills are usually taught. Educators describe third grade as the time when a student transitions from learning to read to reading to learn.

We encourage children to use dictionaries so that they will be able to use the English language effectively. A student cannot do his or her best work without a dictionary. By providing this tool we assist teachers in helping all students become active readers, good writers, creative thinkers, and resourceful learners. Research has shown that one book is often shared by as many as four people. A dictionary in the home serves as a resource for the whole family. It improves everyone's vocabulary, and it encourages children to learn more words.

The program has been adopted and refined by individuals and civic organizations all over the country. Groups such as Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, Elks Lodges, Granges, Lions Clubs, The Republican Federation of Women, TelecomPioneers, and more, have implemented The Dictionary Project where they live. Anyone can participate in this project by sponsoring a program to provide dictionaries to children in their community. The dictionaries are a gift for the children to keep. Our sponsors give dictionaries and other reference books to children in all 50 states, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, 3 Canadian provinces, and more than 15 other countries around the world.

Students can use the dictionaries throughout their school careers. Each year we offer a new edition of our dictionary that has been improved by sharing suggestions from teachers, students, and parents with the publisher. These and other ideas we receive from sponsors, students, and teachers are an integral part of this project because they give our Board of Directors direction. The Dictionary Project is funded through donations and sponsors who introduce the program in their local schools. We are a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, registered as a charity in all 50 states.  A copy of our tax return and state registration are available upon request.

Click to view a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) that most new sponsors and donors ask, it will also help you to answer some of the questions you might have about getting involved in the Dictionary Project.

You can also click here to download a PowerPoint presentation that will give you an introduction about our The Dictionary Project. Click to download PowerPoint 2007 Viewer if you do not have PowerPoint installed on your computer.
Alternatively, you can download the presentation in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.

The Dictionary Project In the News

In 2002, The Wall Street Journal published an article about Mary French and The Dictionary Project. As a result of this article, over 700 new dictionary projects were started all over the country. The Dictionary Project went nationwide in a big way and hasn’t looked back ever since.

The Dictionary Lady Spreads the Word
By JUNE KRONHOLZ Staff Reporter of The WALL STREET JOURNAL

Mrs. French Helps S. C. 3rd Graders Find Meaning of ‘Success’; Also: ‘Ferocious’ and ‘Respect’

CHARLESTON, S.C.-- Six years ago, Mary French set out to give a dictionary to every third grader in every school in South Carolina, every year.

Education “starts with learning how to look things up,” Mrs. French says. It means a certain rigor, uniform expectations, and “doing things properly,” she adds. It means a dictionary, she decided.

There are 44 counties in South Carolina, 86 school districts, 580 elementary schools, 55,000 third graders. The wife of a utility-company supervisor, Mrs. French works alone from the family room of her Charleston tract home and totes dictionaries in the trunk of her 1995 Saturn. She prowls charitable foundations for money, never asking for more than $1,000 and usually getting less. When a Columbia, S.C., school district said it didn’t want her dictionaries, she delivered them anyway and took along a U.S. Congressman to make the point. A small wren of a woman, Mrs. French loses her car in a parking lot, can’t find her way out of the airport and shows up at the wrong hotel for a meeting of school principals, all within an hour. Her conversation flutters from subject to subject, never quite alighting. “People think I'm flaky,” she volunteers. “But what makes me eccentric is that I care deeply about nobody being left out.”

This year, for the third year running, no one will be. Mrs. French, who is 44 years old, expects to reach every third grader in South Carolina, and to begin spreading her Dictionary Project to seven other states as well.

Last year, Americans gave $1.5 billion to charities formed to help the Sept. 11 terrorists’ victims. Three people donated to various causes $1 billion or more each. The largest 400 charities raised $43 billion, says the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the biweekly that covers the nonprofit world. The Salvation Army raised $1.4 billion, and $1.4 billion the year before that, too.

And then there are people like Mrs. French, who work on their own philanthropic visions in their own smaller ways. Last year, Mrs. French’s Dictionary Project raised $75,000. That’s almost double its revenue for 2000. The smallest member of the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 400, its list of the year’s biggest fundraisers, brought in 407 times more than that.
A neighbor does the project’s bookkeeping for free. Mrs. French’s husband, Arno, heads her board. Their children, ages seven and nine, stay late at school to give Mrs. French more time to hand out books and take care of e-mail. She took a $12,000 salary one year, but stopped because, she says, “I hated that it was taking money from the dictionaries.” In a state where 45% of the fourth-graders can barely read, there’s no way to prove that Mrs. French’s dictionaries are helping South Carolina’s third graders. But Gene Huiet, principal of Merriwether Elementary School in North Augusta, near the Georgia border, has received them for six years and says he knows they help. “We’ve got kids who literally read them, who never had a dictionary in the house, and now they’re winners,” he says.
Mrs. French tells a complicated life story that includes dropping out of college in Ohio to take a bike trip across country and abandoning a flower shop in New York because of an abusive business partner. She fled a job as a school-board secretary in New Hampshire--her only paid job in education--because she felt the bleak weather had nudged her toward depression. When she arrived in South Carolina, her five-year plan was to get married, buy a house, have children and finish college, all of which she did. Her 10-year plan was to do something to help the South Carolina schools. That was 10 years ago.
The Dictionary Project began, she says, when she read a letter to the editor in a local newspaper, asking for school dictionaries. Distributing dictionaries, she decided, was a chance to do something for the schools without “looking like you’re meddling.” She scoured bookstores for cheap dictionaries that first year, and delivered 6,500 of them--enough for the third graders in three counties around Charleston. The next year, she doubled that, and the year after that, doubled it again. Along the way, she became known as The Dictionary Lady.

On a rainy morning recently, Mrs. French arrived at Stono Park Elementary in Charleston to hand around her abridged Webster’s Classics to the 92 third graders, then faded into the background. Big words began flying. “Is ‘ferocious’ in here?” asked a boy named Kyle. On the way to page 137 to find out, he stopped at page 110 to announce, “Hey, I found ‘diploma’.” His classmate, Chase, proposed that everyone look up “circuitous” (it’s not in there, but “circuit” and “circular” are on page 79). Across the room, Rohan topped that with “photosynthesis,” on page 253.

Mrs. French then hurried off for the two-hour drive to Columbia, where 42 children waited at Carver-Lyon Elementary School. They raced each other to look up “community” and “perhaps” and “immediately.” Then it was Gadsden Elementary, a half-hour into the piney woods, where 24 third graders competed to find “motivate,” “procedure,” and “library.”
When The Dictionary Project began, Mrs. French made all the deliveries, but volunteers do many of the school visits now. Politicians love to help, and school districts take direct delivery of some of the dictionaries. Still, she visits 50 to 60 schools a year.
A dictionary must include the words “courteous” and “respect” for Mrs. French even to consider giving it away. She believes it should be lightweight enough for small children to want to carry home at night, use type that’s neither too big nor too small, and be neither too hard nor too easy to understand.

For a time, Landoll Inc., an Ohio publisher, supplied Mrs. French with its paperback Webster’s Classic Reference Library Dictionary for 50 cents a copy (“courteous” is on page 95, “respect” on page 274). But in 2000, Tribune Co. sold Landoll to McGraw-Hill Cos. and, nine months later, McGraw-Hill announced a new price—S1.49 for a dictionary that retails for $2.49 on Landoll’s website. Mrs. French says she badgered Landoll and, when that didn’t work, wrote McGraw-Hill Chairman and CEO Harold McGraw III, who assigned two deputies to the issue. She and McGraw-Hill settled on $1.12 a dictionary, shipping included. (A McGraw-Hill spokeswoman calls the first quote “a misunderstanding.”)
Foundation grants and small gifts cover most of The Dictionary Project’s costs. Richard Hendry, vice president of the Community Foundation, which helps people identify charities and manage their giving, calls The Dictionary Project “an easy sell among donors,”  in part because the schools all know the Dictionary Lady, and in part because Mrs. French asks for so little money. Charmed that Mrs. French asked for only $500, Harriet McDougal, a Charleston resident whose husband writes fantasy fiction under the pen name Robert Jordan, says they decided, “Let’s give her some money and see what she can do with it.”
A meticulous, three-page accounting shows that, at $5,000 each, Ms. McDougal and an order of Catholic nuns were The Dictionary Project’s biggest donors last year. In addition are sums from dozens of Rotary Clubs that adopt a few schools each, help hand out the dictionaries, and now have helped spread the project to New Jersey, Ohio, and five other states.

Mrs. French knows all of the clubs’ names and locations. On another meticulous three-page accounting, she records how many books each has given away: 2,160 dictionaries from the Cheraw Rotary Club in South Carolina, which has given the most among the clubs; 31 dictionaries from a club in Phillipsburg, Ohio, which has given the fewest.
As Mrs. French sees it, the Gates Foundation, the biggest U.S. philanthropy with $24 billion in assets, operates not much differently from The Dictionary Project, with no assets at all. Microsoft founder Bill Gates “sits at his dining-room table” with his family, she imagines, and “plans his giving. I do too.” Mr. Gates’ vision is huge—finding an AIDS vaccine, improving teacher education, inoculating Third World children against infectious disease.
In its way, Mrs. French’s vision is no less grand. “We are putting words in the hands of children,” she says.

Feel free to contact our director Mary French, if you have any questions or concerns: wordpower@dictionaryproject.org