Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

“sprachgefühl,” a German word we’ve stolen into English that means “a feeling for language.” Sprachgefühl is a slippery eel, the odd buzzing in your brain that tells you that “planting the lettuce” and “planting misinformation” are different uses of “plant,” the eye twitch that tells you that “plans to demo the store” refers not to a friendly instructional stroll on how to shop but to a little exuberance with a sledgehammer. Not everyone has sprachgefühl, and you don’t know if you are possessed of it until you are knee-deep in the English language, trying your best to navigate the mucky swamp of it. I use “possessed of” advisedly: You will never have sprachgefühl, but rather sprachgefühl will have you,

English, but it wasn’t taken seriously as a literary language until Henry V suddenly began using it in his official correspondence in 1417. Within a few decades, English had become the language of the English bureaucracy, replacing French and Latin almost completely.

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.

world, but the two big ones that lexicographers must wrestle with are real defining and lexical defining. 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?”

lexical defining, which is the attempt to describe how a word is used and what it is used to mean in a particular setting.

A word that in 1950 might have taken twenty years to come to popular attention and use now may take less than a year. This means that you have to evaluate the types of sources very carefully, and you have to make judgment calls, at times, on whether a word has staying power.

Meaning is a spectrum; you are only describing the biggest data clusters on that spectrum.

quotations used in dictionaries need to meet three main criteria: they need to illustrate the most common usage of the word; they need to use only words that are entered in that particular dictionary; and they need to be as boring as humanly possible.

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,

summarize the anti-reclamation argument: “As feminism taught us long ago, the personal is political; women who normalize ‘bitch’ also normalize sexism.”

The force of the word’s full meaning is contained in something that lexicographers can’t measure: the interplay between intention and reception.

“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.

These alphabets are phonemic, not phonetic. 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.

There have been attempts to remedy this. Buchanan, Benjamin Franklin, and Noah Webster all proposed, with varying degrees of success, alternate spellings and alternate spelling systems that would bring the orthography of English more in line with its pronunciation. Only Webster succeeded, and his success was very limited: while Americans do use some of his spelling reforms, like “plow” for “plough” and “honor” in place of “honour,” his more extreme suggestions (“wimen” for “women” and “tung” for “tongue,” both of which show up in his 1828 dictionary) never caught on.

English, however, is highly stressed; stress plays a part in distinguishing homographs and meaning, like “PRO-duce” and “pro-DUCE.”

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

Modifiers mark a philosophical—and, in this case, lexical—divide.

They believe that if we make a change to the dictionary, then we have made a change to the language, and if we make a change to the language, then we also make a change to the culture around that language. We see this most poignantly in requests to remove slurs of various kinds from our dictionaries. If you remove “retarded” from the dictionary, people tell us, then no one will smear someone as “retarded” ever again, because that word is no longer a word. I am the unfortunate drudge who must inform them that we cannot miraculously wipe out centuries of a word’s use merely by removing it from the dictionary.