Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

“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!”

Every day, lexicographers plunge into the roiling mess of English, up to the elbows, to fumble and grasp at the right words to describe ennui, love, or chairs.

By the time English lexicographers came on the scene in the late Middle Ages, our parts of speech were fixed and based entirely on Latin and Greek. This occasionally presents problems, because English is not Latin or Greek.

Real defining is the stuff of philosophy and theology: it is the attempt to describe the essential nature of something. Real defining answers questions like “What is truth?” “What is love?” “Do sounds exist if no one is around to hear them?” and “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”

This parenthetical adjunct tells you that surfboards are generally made of wood, fiberglass, or foam, but it also doesn’t rule out surfboards made of a sentient plastic that molds to the surfer’s foot and biometrically adapts to the rider’s surfing style, communicating with each molecule of water in the ocean underneath to produce the optimal wave for maximum gnarliness.

The meaning is something that resides in the word, and the definition is a description of that.

This is the mercy of being part of an editorial team: it’s likely that not all of you will lose your minds at exactly the same time.

Part of why people love etymology is because it tells a story about English and a word’s place in it, and sometimes that story tells you something about the culture or time period in which that word blossomed.

“Everything in etymology is conjecture and reconstruction.”

People assume that etymologies are either so self-evident that they don’t need study or so opaque that the etymologist is literally creating the history out of nothing. Some incantations, a little hand waving, some adverbs, and hey, presto: out of nowhere appears the etymology of “ghost.”

There are far better writers who have undertaken a full study of the production, sale, and fallout from the Third, and if the subject interests you, I would recommend you read those books (particularly Morton’s Story of “Webster’s Third” and Skinner’s Story of Ain’t) in addition to this one.