Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

I hadn’t just fallen down this rabbit hole: I saw that hole in the distance and ran full tilt at it, throwing myself headlong into it. The more I learned, the more I fell in love with this wild, vibrant whore of a language.

He sat impassive across from me as I blithered, awash in flop sweat and aware—perhaps for the first time since I answered the want ad—that I really, really wanted this job, and I was really, really rambling.

This paints quite a picture, but sounds so right for a situation where you're as nervous as you are excited

At Merriam-Webster, there are only two formal requirements to be a lexicographer: you must have a degree in any field from an accredited four-year college or university, and you must be a native speaker of English.

There are some additional unmeasurable and unstated requirements to be a lexicographer. First and foremost, you must be possessed of something called “sprachgefühl,” a German word we’ve stolen into English that means “a feeling for language.”

You will never have sprachgefühl, but rather sprachgefühl will have you, like a Teutonic imp that settles itself at the base of your skull and hammers at your head every time you read something like “crispy-fried rice” on a menu. The imp will dig its nails into your brain, and instead of ordering take-out Chinese, you will be frozen at the take-out counter, wondering if “crispy-fried rice” refers to plain rice that has been flash fried or to the dish known as “fried rice” but perhaps prepared in a new and exciting way. That hyphen, you think, could just be slapdash misuse, or…And your Teutonic imp giggles and squeezes its claws a little harder.

Emily Brewster, who has been an editor at Merriam-Webster for over fifteen years, sums up the secret longing of every lexicographer: “Yes, this is what I want to do. I want to sit alone in a cubicle all day and think about words and not really talk to anybody else. That sounds great!”

There is nothing worse than being just a syllable’s length away from the perfect, Platonic ideal of the definition for “measly,” being able to see it crouching in the shadows of your mind, only to have it skitter away when your co-worker begins a long and loud conversation that touches on the new coffee filters, his colonoscopy, and the chances that the Sox will go all the way this year.*5

It’s not that editors don’t like fun; it’s that we like our fun to be a little less whoop-y.*7

No matter how book smart, we are all idiots at seventeen.

The editorial potlucks have gone on for over twenty years and will probably go on for another twenty, along with that damned coffeemaker.

This captures the wry "i love this beautiful disaster" vibe of the whole chapter

Adverbs look like everything else; they are the junk drawer of the English language (“like so”).

Ask any lexicographer who has been at this gig for a while what word had them hunched over their cubicle at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, hands clutched to their temples, the office copy of Quirk open on their desk while the night janitor loudly scrummed with the big recycling bin, and the answer will not be a polysyllabic hummer like “sesquipedalian.” The answer will be “but,” “like,” “as.” They are sly shape-shifters that often live between parts of speech; they are the ones you will keep coming back to throughout your career to parse and re-parse, the ones that will give you a handful of uses that you stare at for days and days before muttering “to hell with it” and labeling them as adverbs.

To linguists and lexicographers, the word “grammar” has generally referred to the way that words interact with each other in a sentence or the systematic rules that govern the way those words interact.

Programmers too!

As we go through life (and particularly through school), we collect more blocks to stack on our foundation: don’t end sentences with prepositions; don’t use the passive voice; use “were” for “was” in conditional clauses (though not always, and the exceptions are more blocks to collect later). The blocks become smaller, able to be wedged into any noticeable gaps in our walls. “Lay” is used with a stated object (“lay the book on the table”) and “lie” is used without a stated object (“I’m going to lie down on the sofa”); “who” is only used in reference to people and “that” only in reference to things; definitely do not ever, under any circumstances, use “ain’t.” We scrabble at these and mortar them into place, building our towers higher and higher and always comparing ourselves with people who have found fewer bricks or have built their towers sloppily. It’s all reckoned as “grammar” to us, by which we inevitably mean “good grammar” and by which we measure ourselves against others.

All a word needs to merit entry into most professionally written dictionaries is widespread and sustained use in written English prose.

This wasn’t anything new: complaints about the fitness of English have practically been a national pastime since at least the twelfth century, and if the written record were more complete, I’m sure we’d find scrawled in the corner of some Old English manuscript a complaint that English is horrible and Latin is way better.

So where do these rules come from, if not from actual use? Most of them are the personal peeves, codified into law, of dead white men of yore.

If you ask a modern adherent to this rule why, exactly, you aren’t supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, they merely goggle at you as if you had just asked why you aren’t supposed to lick electrical sockets. Because it’s objectively better not to, that’s why.

Blending grammatical systems from two languages on different branches of the Indo-European language tree is a bit like mixing orange juice and milk: you can do it, but it’s going to be nasty.

The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth.

Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage.

We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.

We tend to think of dialects (insofar as we think of them at all) as regional—Southern English, Boston English, Texan—but different social classes, ethnicities, and age-groups can have their own dialects. That means that dialects can be polarizing; they and their speakers are often subject to stereotype and scrutiny.

See also "How You Say It"

Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up:

Shit, Claire has used this logic on me!

Because we live in a literate society with comparatively easy access to books and education, we tend to believe that the written word is more important and has more weight than the spoken word.

See also le guin on oral storytelling cultures

“Portmanteau” is itself a portmanteau: it’s the medieval French word for a large suitcase and is a blend of porter (“to carry”) and manteau (“mantle, cloak”).

“Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”—a word that puzzlers and lexicographers call “P45”—sure looks like and sounds like the name of a great disease, and it is entered in our Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, but it does not have any meaningful use. In fact, it appears to have been coined by the president of the National Puzzlers’ League in 1935 just to see if dictionaries would fall for it. We did. We’re a little more careful now.

This takes the lead as my favorite nugget so far, ha!

Meaning is a spectrum; you are only describing the biggest data clusters on that spectrum. Madeline Novak puts it this way: “There’s a meaning there, and it could be sliced up any of a variety of ways, none of which really capture the whole thing. You’re going to be dissatisfied with it no matter what, so you’re kidding yourself if you think you’ve pinpointed it. There’s still stuff oozing around the edges.”

You are then handed a sheaf of paper and asked to edit the definitions found on it, all of them having been taken from earlier Merriam-Webster dictionaries. You get another such worksheet for where to enter phrases, another one that asks you to fix the capitalization of older entries, and another that asks you to fix the inflected forms of older entries. This is existentially unnerving, because these definitions are taken from published dictionaries, which means they were written by people who had more training and practice than you do. It is your memento moron: no matter how smart and excellent, remember that you, too, will fuck up.

I love this

I have also, as Gil pointed out, gendered the definition when I didn’t need to. He struck the “his” from “his running mate.” “It is conceivable,” he said afterward, while going over my definitions with me, “that a woman will run for president at some point, and if she does, this definition will need to be revised. So why not write it in a way that the gender of the candidate doesn’t matter.” I was gobsmacked: here I was, a recent graduate of a women’s college, getting schooled on gendered language by an old guy.

Lexicographers tend to fall into one of two categories when it comes to writing definitions: lumpers and splitters. Lumpers are definers who tend to write broad definitions that can cover several more minor variations on that meaning; splitters are people who tend to write discrete definitions for each of those minor variations. This seems to be a natural inclination: lumpers have a very hard time teasing out the micro-meanings covered by their broad definitions, and splitters have a very hard time collapsing their incredibly concise definitions into one.

The goal of a dictionary is to tell people what words mean and show them how they are used in the most objective, dispassionate, and robotic way possible. People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for. They just want to glance at an entry, get a sense of what the word they’re looking at means, and then get back to finishing their homework, love letter, or all-caps, keyboard-mashing screed.

You are not euphoric, or Zen, or any of the other things that Runner’s World magazine makes running look like. You are at the Wall, where you are nothing but a loose collection of human limits.

As I looked at a citation for “took first things first,” I felt myself slowly unspooling into idiocy. I knew the glyphs before me had to be words, because my job was all about words, and I knew they had to be English, because my job was all about English. But knowing something doesn’t make it true. This was all garbage, I thought, and as I felt my brain slip sideways, and the yawing ache open up in my gut, one thought flitted across my mind before I slammed headlong into the lexicographer’s equivalent of the Wall: “Oh my God, I’m going to die at my desk like in that urban legend, and they will find my body under an avalanche of ‘take.’ ”

I marched my finished batch back to the galley table, flipped the sign-out sheet back several pages—we were already in U—and signed “take” back in. It had taken a month of nonstop editorial work.

While discussing this, I announced to the table that I had done “take” for the Eleventh Collegiate, and it had taken me about a month. One of the academics at the table shook his head. “Wow.” Peter piped up. “I revised ‘run,’ ” he said quietly, then smiled. “It took me nine months.” The table burst forth in a chorus of “Jesuses!” Nine months! But of course it did. In the OED, “run” has over six hundred separate senses, making the Collegiate’s “take” look like kid stuff. I lifted my glass of wine from the other end of the table. “Here’s to ‘run,’ ” I said. “May it never come up for revision again in our lifetimes.” *1

The problem that lexicographers face with a reclaimed word like “bitch” is the same problem that Jane’s struggle with the definition of “microaggression” is, just writ large. The force of the word’s full meaning is contained in something that lexicographers can’t measure: the interplay between intention and reception. What’s more important: the intention of the speaker or the reception by the hearer?

Why do we say that someone’s “worth their salt”? Because in the ancient world salt was such a valuable commodity that we used to pay people in it (and this is why you also get a salary).

“asshat,” which drily mentions the movies Raising Arizona and City Slickers before offering a final etymological analysis: “The current meaning of asshat may be a reanalysis, perhaps in part based on the expression ‘have one’s head up one’s ass’ (meaning ‘to be obtuse, be insufficiently conscious of one’s surroundings’), perhaps in part due to simple phonetic similarity to asshole. A more precise history will depend on the location of further attestations.”

Getting the classy treatment it deserves

Who thought that “pumpernickel” was a good name for a dark rye bread? Because when you trace the word back to its German origins, you find it means “fart goblin,”*5 and now you cannot help but blench and giggle whenever you see pumpernickel.

It is true that the earliest English use of “decimate” meant “to select and destroy one-tenth of.” That’s because when “decimate” was first used in English, it was primarily in contexts that described the harsh military discipline of the Romans. “Decimate” in the “one-tenth” meaning came into English in the late sixteenth century, and by the mid-seventeenth century its use had been expanded to refer to causing great harm. For about two hundred years, these two senses lived side by side without any peevery touching them.

This came up in whichever Dresden Files book I read recently. Silly

Etymological fallacy is the worst sort of pedantry: a meaningless personal opinion trying to dress itself up as concern for preserving historical principles. It misses that language change itself is a historical principle: a language that doesn’t change is a dead language, and as much as etymological fallacists seem to love the purity of Latin,*6 you’ll notice that none of them have abandoned that whore English for it.

We think that we have the right to go through the photo album of English’s life and throw away the pictures that don’t make sense—blurred pictures, or snaps from that unfortunate stage when it was surly and uncooperative. But those deviations from the plumb line contain surprises and delights not just about English but about the world we live in.

“OK,” which might just be one of the most widely understood English words in the world, came into being as an initialism from “oll korrect,” which was a facetious misspelling of “all correct” that came about because of a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings and the abbreviation thereof. And now you, too, know that there was a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings.

A living language made by fallible people will not be perfect, but it will occasionally make for remarkable reading.

This is one of the joys of dating: everything is older than you think it is. The linguist Arnold Zwicky has coined the term “the recency illusion” to refer to the misbegotten assumption that anything that strikes you as new in language is a recent innovation, when, in fact, it’s not.

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).

It is very difficult to make this association of pron-->pronunciation

The letters in a phonetic system represent one sound per letter; the letters in a phonemic system represent a group of sounds per letter, because an individual phoneme (the smallest unit of sound in an utterance, and the thing that our pronunciation alphabets represent) can vary depending on your accent and dialect.

Peter Sokolowski remembers being in the hallway outside the pronunciation editor’s office one day and hearing from within the office a very measured voice say, as blandly as possible, “Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.” It was one of our old pronunciation editors, trying to get the intonation right for the audio file. He left a few years later to become a priest.

I love these little vignettes haha

Many early dictionaries, written as they were for those learning English as a foreign language, provide some basic guidance in pronunciation, though it’s not where we moderns expect it to be. Often, the pronunciation help was given in a long section of prose at the beginning of the dictionary, sometimes disguised as grammar or orthography or prosody.

I've seen this in fiction and appreciate it