Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

the folks at Oxford Dictionaries say that they have more evidence nowadays of “bored of” than they do of “bored by,” and the evidence shows uses of “bored with” and “bored of” are neck and neck over there—but

you have to distinguish between the definition of a word and the meaning of a word. The meaning is something that resides in the word, and the definition is a description of that. But a definition is an artificial thing.”

Some of the all-time top lookups at Merriam-Webster are “paradigm,” “disposition,” “ubiquitous,” and “esoteric,” words that are used fairly regularly but also in contexts that don’t tell the reader much about what they mean.

One part of many identity movements is linguistic reclamation. This is a process by which a maligned group—women, gay men, people of color, the disabled, and so on—take an inflammatory slur that’s been directed at them as a group and begin using it themselves as an identity marker of pride. It’s done to remove power from the oppressor, the linguistic version of catching an arrow shot at you in flight.

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.

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.