The usage of a language is the manner in which the written and spoken language is routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to “the collective habits of a language’s native speakers”, as opposed to theoretical or idealized models of how a language works or in the abstract. Fowler characterized usage as “the way in which a word or phrase is normally and correctly used” and as the “points of grammar, syntax, style, and the choice of words.”
In the descriptive tradition of language analysis, “correct” tends to mean “functionally adequate for the purposes of the speaker or writer using it”; usage is also, however, a concern for the prescriptive tradition, for which “correctness” is a matter of arbitrating style.
Dictionaries are not generally designed to participate in linguistic prescriptivism , and are thus not intended to guide “good usage” in the latter sense.
