Dictionary

The Dictionary is one of the most potent symbols of forbidden knowledge in the Commander's study, a room where Offred is permitted to enter only at night and under the Commander's supervision. It sits on the top shelf to the left of the fireplace, alongside several other dictionaries, and represents the written word that Handmaids are strictly prohibited from accessing. When Offred asks the Commander about the Latin phrase scratched into her cupboard—"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum"—she cannot pronounce it properly and does not know its meaning. The Commander hesitates at the novel idea of her writing it down, then thrusts his roller-tip pen across the desk at her "almost defiantly, as if taking a dare." Offred prints the phrase carefully on a desktop notepad with a smile-button face printed at the top, copying it from inside her head, from inside her closet. The pen between her fingers feels "sensuous, alive almost," and she can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. She reflects on Aunt Lydia's motto "Pen Is Envy" and realizes that just holding the pen is envy itself—one more thing she would like to steal.

The Commander's Revelation

The Commander takes the smile-button page from Offred and looks at it. Then he begins to laugh, and she notices he is blushing. "That's not real Latin," he says. "That's just a joke." Offred is bewildered—she has risked so much, made a grab at knowledge, for a mere joke. The Commander's laughter is nostalgic, the laughter of indulgence towards his former self. He gets up, crosses to the bookshelves, and takes down a book from his trove: not the Dictionary, but an old, dog-eared textbook. Before showing it to her, he thumbs through it, contemplative and reminiscent. He lays it open on the desk in front of her. What Offred sees first is a picture: the Venus de Milo in a black-and-white photo, with a mustache and a black brassiere and armpit hair drawn clumsily on her. On the opposite page is the Colosseum in Rome, labeled in English, and below it a conjugation: "sum es est, su-mus estis sunt." The Commander points, and in the margin Offred sees it, written in the same ink as the hair on the Venus: "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum."

The Meaning of the Phrase

The Commander explains that it is "sort of hard to explain why it's funny unless you know Latin." He tells her that schoolboys used to write all kinds of things like that, and he does not know where they got them—from older boys perhaps. Forgetful of her and of himself, he turns the pages, showing her another scrawl: "pirn pis pit, pimus pistis pants" next to a picture called The Sabine Women. He stops, returning to the present, embarrassed, and smiles again—this time a grin. Offred imagines freckles on him, a cowlick, and for a moment she almost likes him. When she presses him for the meaning, he says, "It meant, 'Don't let the bastards grind you down.' I guess we thought we were pretty smart, back then." Offred forces a smile, but the full implication dawns on her: the previous Handmaid must have learned the phrase here, in this room, during some previous period of boyhood reminiscence and confidences exchanged with the Commander. She has not been the first to enter his silence and play children's word games with him.

The Dictionary's Narrative Significance

The Dictionary episode crystallizes Offred's relationship with the Commander and her position within the regime. The act of looking up a word—something so ordinary in the time before—becomes a dangerous, transgressive act that reveals the fragility of the Commander's power and the emptiness of the previous Handmaid's resistance. The phrase "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum," which Offred had treated as a prayer or a command, is revealed to be nothing more than a schoolboy joke, a piece of graffiti that offers no real escape. The Dictionary, like the Commander's study itself, is an "oasis of the forbidden" that ultimately provides only the illusion of knowledge and power. Offred's discovery that the previous Handmaid learned the phrase from the Commander, and that she later hanged herself, underscores the futility of seeking salvation through the very system that oppresses her. The Dictionary thus becomes a symbol of the gap between the promise of knowledge and the reality of powerlessness, a reminder that even the words Offred clings to for hope are borrowed from the men who control her.