The Danger of Dictionaries Part II: The More Dangering

I've talked about the limitations and absurdity of dictionaries before, and I'm back with a new bunch of examples. These all come from a word-finding app called Spellix. When you find a word in the game, you are (sometimes) shown its definition. Now, I have no idea why the game does this. It's of no use as far as gameplay goes. The definitions have nothing to do with scoring, and as they show up after you enter words, all I can think is that the game designers wanted to throw in a little "educational" component.

Which... okay. Fine. The world can always use more "educational," um... components. But the definitions are so strange as to be doubly useless. (But they did provide an additional dimension of entertainment, so that's something.) Here, take a look and see what I mean.

Each of these is such a perfect bauble of superfluous gibberish that it's almost impressive. Why do these things exist? Why did the game designers spend the time (and—oh god—the money?) to produce these "definitions"? They are of no utility for anything. Where they aren't tautologous (SICKS as people who are sick and SING as, basically, to sing), they are almost sort of accurate, in a well-meaning but fevered way (see CAT and BEEPS). And then you come to OGRES, the definition of which—as they say—isn't even wrong. Everything about this is gloriously, breathtakingly unlike anything of any value. Even if ogre had something to do with numbers, who on earth would describe any number as the sum of 7 and 1? And GEN as an informal term for information? Wh—? I mean—? Why did—?