Meaning

Alice's question cuts to the heart of a genuine philosophical puzzle about language: can words be stretched to cover whatever meaning a speaker wants, or do they carry fixed meanings that exist independently of the person using them? She is pushing back against the idea that language is simply a tool of individual will, insisting that words must have some stable shared meaning if communication is to be possible at all. It is a thoughtful challenge, especially coming from a child.

Context

This exchange appears in Lewis Carroll's 1871 sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, during Alice's famous conversation with Humpty Dumpty. Humpty has just declared that he can make words mean whatever he chooses, and Alice's question is her direct, logical rebuttal. Carroll structured the dialogue as a genuine philosophical debate, and it has since attracted serious attention from linguists and philosophers interested in questions of meaning, reference, and the limits of linguistic authority. The scene is one of the most intellectually rich passages in either of the Alice books.

About the author

Alice is the fictional child protagonist created by Lewis Carroll for his two Alice novels. Throughout both books she serves as a rational, grounded presence in an irrational world, and her tendency to ask direct questions makes her an effective foil for the stranger characters she meets. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was deeply interested in logic and language, and the conversations he wrote for Alice often reflect genuine intellectual preoccupations dressed up in the language of fantasy and play.