Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

“We’re not antisocial,” says Emily Vezina, a cross-reference editor. “We’re just social in our own way.”

There will never be a break. A dictionary is out of date the minute that it’s done.

The Transitizer, as some of us call it, is a pink with a sentence on it and a hole cut out where the verb of the sentence is so you can lay the card over your problem verb and read the resulting sentence to see if that verb is, in fact, transitive. The Transitizer reads, “I’ma ______ ya ass.”

We don’t just enter the good stuff; we enter the bad and the ugly stuff, too. We are just observers, and the goal is to describe, as accurately as possible, as much of the language as we can. This approach is “descriptivism,” and it is the philosophical basis for almost all modern dictionaries.