For the 16th year, Mathews Memorial Library has participated in the Dictionary Project, a national effort established in 1995 to provide all school students around the country with dictionaries to use as their own personal reference books. 

On Tuesday, the library’s youth services head, Carol McCormack, her assistant, Carol Owens, and volunteers Sally Howland and Jane Senyk spent the morning visiting third grade classes, handing out the dictionaries, and engaging students in exercises to look up words and their meanings. The Dictionary Project is typically implemented in the third grade.

The idea for The Dictionary Project began in 1992 when Annie Plummer of Savannah, Georgia, a high school dropout, learned how hard it was to get a job without a high school diploma, said the release. She knew that learning was important, so she bought dictionaries and gave one to every third grader in her county.

In her lifetime, Plummer raised the money to buy 17,000 dictionaries for chi...