You're probably using the wrong dictionary
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014)
Most people treat dictionaries as utilities for looking up unfamiliar words, but John McPhee uses his to punch up prose, looking up words he already knows 99 times out of 100. The secret is Webster's 1913 dictionary, where 'flash' yields 'to flash conviction on the mind' and 'sport' becomes 'a diversion of the field.' Modern dictionaries, by contrast, are dry and technocratic, stripped of the literary richness that once made them a quarry of good things.
A book where you can enter 'sport' and end up with 'a diversion of the field' -- this is in fact the opposite of what I'd known a dictionary to be.