Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

Better writers than I have used the singular “their” or “they,” and the language has not yet fallen all to hell.

The more I learned, the more I fell in love with this wild, vibrant whore of a language.

Even the coffee seems anachronistic: it’s anonymous stuff that comes in oversized orange foil packets—packets whose vintage seems to match the industrial coffeemaker we use that dates back to the Johnson administration. The grit in the foil packets produces coffee that tastes like wet cardboard, but it is our coffee and we will not change it.

English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive into it, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air.

It’s currently stuffed with old dictionaries and a small table, around which four editors can sit comfortably and six in introverted terror, warily holding their elbows to their sides and breathing shallowly so as not to make unintentional physical contact with anyone else in the room.

I feel seen so much by this book so far; but equally, I find myself questioning whether I'm an introvert at all.

“Person, place, thing” is wholly inadequate: “hope” is a noun, as is “murder.” Are those people, places, or things?

The grammarians of the seventeenth century onward weren’t interested so much in preserving the language as it was used as in perpetuating a re-formed idea of what language should be.

It’s hard to jump to the conclusion that the jury would have decided differently had the interview been transcribed differently. But the “mights” weigh very heavily: had a native speaker of AAVE been on the jury or in the courtroom, Jeantel’s testimony might not have been discredited, and the verdict might have been different. That is, as we say in my native dialect, worth reckoning.

People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for.

There are today likely more women who are lexicographers than men, but the landscape of lexicography is still overwhelmingly beige.

The nursery rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” is a lie that every five-year-old knows in their deep waters.

Or that “OMG” goes back to 1917, when it was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill.

Pron citations come from three main sources: broadcast media (which includes radio, TV, movies, and cable), audio or video on the Internet (YouTube and podcasts being the big generators), and human contact (phone calls, the aforementioned office polls, and face-to-face conversations). Steve Kleinedler, who handles the pronunciations

itis frightening to think that Merlin, Roderic, and co's misprounounciations may eventually set a standard

We don’t just want our words to have meaning, we want them to mean something, and the difference is palpable.

“Experience has a great deal to do with competence,”

“That’s what I do,” he says simply. “This is my own little contribution to the world.”