Guilty by Definition

by Susie Dent

The word “slip” has a specific meaning in lexicography, another tribal code that Martha had quickly mastered. According to her predecessor, Mike, crowdsourcing began with dictionaries. Martha remembered him talking about it as he gave her the tour, shortly before she started work at the CED. Part of the handover. Any scholarly or historical lexicon, he had continued, relies on evidence in the wild of a word’s personality: how it behaves, the friends it keeps, the environment in which it thrives and, if you’re lucky, the one that created it in the first place. Lexicographers gather this information in different ways. Some rely on the data behind existing dictionaries, where the legwork has already been done, but others start the hunt anew. The Clarendon English Dictionary certainly belonged in this last category, the ongoing result of a mammoth logistical operation involving evidence submitted by thousands of volunteer readers. Astronomers, novelists, vicars, suffragists and housewives, philosophers and paleontologists, and even a few convicted criminals had collectively built the backbone of what had come to be regarded as the highest lexicographical authority in the world. The clues amassed by this curious and eager army of readers were submitted on strips of paper—slips—comprising four-by-six-inch biographical records of language. They amounted to thousands, submitted in such numbers after a public appeal by the dictionary’s editors that the lexicographers had trouble fi...