Has Anyone Memorized the Dictionary?

The current world record for the number of entries memorized by an individual is held by Mahaveer Jain of India, who can recall 80,000 individual entries, as well as their sequence and page numbers in the dictionary.

Who has read the entire dictionary?

But a man has just completed the mammoth, if not bizarre, task of reading the 22,000-page tome cover to cover. Ammon Shea, 37, who has been dissecting dictionaries since the age of 10, spent a year absorbing 59 million words, from A to Zyxt - the equivalent of reading a John Grisham novel every day.

Can you learn a language by memorizing a dictionary?

No, you couldn't, but not for some deep philosophical reason. But just because the lexicon (the store of words) is only one part of any language. You would also need to learn the grammar of the language.