Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

If you survived the American educational system, you can probably rattle off at least four parts of speech—noun, verb, adjective, adverb—and here the nerds among us chime in with the remainder: conjunction, interjection, pronoun, and preposition. Most people think of the parts of speech as discrete categories, drawers with their own identifying labels, and when you peek inside, there’s the English language, neatly folded like a retiree’s socks: Person, Place, Thing (Noun); Describes Action (Verb); Modifies Nouns (Adjective); Answers the W Questions (Adverb); Joins Words Together (Conjunction); Things We Say When We Are Happy, Surprised, or Pissed Off (Interjection).

“The young editors were bent to Webster’s will” and, after some mental finagling, decide that “bent” is actually a verb here (the past tense of “bend”). Very good. Is this use of “bend” transitive (that is, it requires an object, as in “I bend steel”) or intransitive (that is, it doesn’t require an object, as in “reeds bend”)?

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.

“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.”

Many people—and many people who think they’d be good at this lexicography gig—believe that the dictionary is some great guardian of the English language, that its job is to set boundaries of decorum around this profligate language like a great linguistic housemother setting curfew. Words that have made it into the dictionary are Official with a capital O, sanctioned, part of Real and Proper English. The corollary is that if certain words are bad, uncouth, unlovely, or distasteful, then folks think that the dictionary will make sure they are never entered into its hallowed pages, and thus are such words banished from Real, Official, Proper English. The language is thus protected, kept right, pure, good. This is commonly called “prescriptivism,” and it is unfortunately not how dictionaries work at all. 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. All a word needs to merit entry into most professionally written dictionaries is widespread and sustained use in written English prose. You’d be surprised how many “bad” and “unlovely” words make it into written English prose on a consistent basis.

The idea that “poor” marks quality whereas “bad” marks morality is truly a peeve beyond all other peeves—a real peever’s peeve. Well done).

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.

English has a grammatical structure similar to other Germanic languages, and Latin has a grammatical structure similar to other Italic languages. 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.

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 dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.

You are correct that “irregardless” is an illogical coinage, but so is “inflammable” to mean “able to catch fire” and “unthaw” to mean “to thaw,” and yet no one disputes that those are words.

Dialects are little subsets of a language, and they have their own vocabulary, syntax, phonology, and grammar that sometimes overlap with other dialects of the main language and sometimes don’t. “Y’all” is a dialectal term for the second-person plural pronoun; it’s completely standard in some dialects of American English, particularly the ones in the South, and while it’s common to hear speakers of those dialects use it easily, it’s not a normal part of the dialect we call Standard English. 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.

I abandoned uptalk; I stopped g-dropping and /ɪ/ tensing and did my level best to sound smoothly, blandly western and white. As careful as I was, my dialect still betrayed me when I relocated to New England for college. The way I spoke sounded completely normal to my ears, but drop that dialect smack into the middle of Massachusetts and suddenly I was a big ol’ hick. My roommate used to make fun of how flat and wide my vowels were; I spoke so slowly that one classmate assumed I had a speech impediment. I said “howdy” often, and in response one deeply stupid (or cruel) woman asked if I rode a horse to school and had electricity where I grew up. Each comment, no matter how it was phrased, was intended to prove one thing: I was outside, a stranger. I was not from here, and so was exoticized or ostracized accordingly.

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: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales?

Thinking about documenting language brings on a gurgle of dread deep in the editorial gut. The philosophy of citation gathering actually runs counter to how language forms. 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. It makes some sort of sense: speech is ephemeral, captured only once by the listener and sorted like mental junk mail, a little slip of information that may or may not be useful and that either gets tossed or ends up moldering underneath the grocery list, the name of your first pet, and the chorus to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” Writing, on the other hand, is eternal; just ask anyone who has posted anything of questionable taste on the Internet. Once it’s written down, it’s real. But this is, to use a technical term, totally bogus. Speech is actually the primary way that language gets transmitted, and linguistic research of all stripes bears this out. Under

ordinary circumstances, we learn to speak before we learn to read, and anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows that the gold standard of fluency isn’t your reading comprehension but your ability to ask a native speaker of that language which team they favor in the World Cup and to fully understand and participate in the argument that will inevitably ensue. That means that new words and phrases are almost always coined and spoken for some time before they get written down, and that is a whole area of language creation that the lexicographer doesn’t have access to.

The goal behind reading and marking is to add new and interesting words to the citation files, and to do that well, you must pay attention to what you’re reading—but not too much attention. The commonest problem a lexicographer encounters in reading and marking is finding oneself interested in the content and not the language.

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 is the sort of defining that many budding lexicographers imagine doing: sitting at a leather-topped desk in an office made of warm wood, being erudite, and getting your philosophy on.

Lexicographers don’t do real defining. In fact, the hallmark of bad lexicography is the attempt to do real defining. Lexicographers only get to do lexical defining, which is the attempt to describe how a word is used and what it is used to mean in a particular setting.

It is your memento moron: no matter how smart and excellent, remember that you, too, will fuck up.

There are more oddities in lexicography. The first is the weirdest and appears to be consistent across all traditional dictionary publishers: no one starts writing a dictionary in A. Ever. When I asked Steve about this—dumbfounded, because where else do you start but at the beginning?—he gave two answers. First, every dictionary—not dictionary publisher, but every book that publisher puts out—has its own style guide, and it takes definers a while to settle into that guide. Hell, sometimes it takes a few letters for the style guide to even be finished. Starting about a third of the way through the alphabet, in short letters like H or K, gives editors time to settle into the new style before getting to some of those bigger letters. Many dictionaries are revised from H (or thereabouts) onward to Z, and then A through H (or thereabouts), with the first middle bunch of letters (H, maybe I) getting another revision.

You don’t want reviewers catching a style change midway through A, do you? A through D would be, as the last letters worked on, as close to stylistic perfection as possible. No reviewer is going to look too closely at K.

Exactly 11 percent of your dictionary is made of words that begin with S. One-tenth of your dictionary is made up of one twenty-sixth of the alphabet.

It seems like mentioning that surfboards aren’t always wood might be a good idea. Fortunately, for Merriam-Webster editors, there is a good detail hedge we can use: the parenthetical adjunct. It’s a device wherein we can give in-definition examples of a range without committing to the elements in that range. “A long, narrow, buoyant board made of wood, fiberglass, or foam and used in the sport of surfing” is a fabulous definition for right this very second, but what if some bright surfing engineer starts making boards out of a special kind of plastic? Or carbon fiber? Or what if they invent an entirely new polymer that your tiny word-bound brain can’t even conceive of in this moment, and that becomes the industry standard for surfboards in a few years? You can give yourself an out by using the parenthetical adjunct instead: “a long, narrow, buoyant board (as of wood, fiberglass, or foam) used in the sport of surfing.” The “as” signals that the list that follows isn’t exhaustive; the parentheses give a visual clue that this is secondary information; and the words themselves tell you some of the more common members of that range. 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 f...

“In an odd way,” Steve Perrault says, “I tend to feel that the definition is an imperfect thing any way you look at it. A definition is an attempt to explain a word’s meaning using these certain conventions, and 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.”

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.

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.

It is best, in fact, to assume that every verbal illustration you write will offend someone, somewhere, at some point.

People don’t learn language in individual words but in chunks of language.

Phrasal verbs are two- or three-word phrases that are made up of a verb and a preposition or adverb (or both), that function like a verb, and whose meaning cannot be figured out from the meanings of each individual constituent.

If logophiles want to be lexicographers when they grow up, then lexicographers want to be etymologists. Etymology is the study of the history and origins of words, lexical genealogy, and etymologists are the practitioners of it. Lexicographers love the nerdy intricacies of a language, trading esoteric factoids like baseball cards, but etymologists master the nerdy intricacies of language, not just a language—language morphology, phonology, and history as a whole. The amount of information they know is almost superhuman.

Humans are inveterate storytellers. If history is lacking, we are happy to embellish it. And so, if a story behind the creation of a word has too many good details, etymologists grow suspicious.

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.

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.

“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. English has survived through conquest and adaptation, and many of those adaptations are blunt mistakes and misreadings. A living language made by fallible people will not be perfect, but it will occasionally make for remarkable reading.

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.

When I scanned the e-mail that had come in about the word “marriage,” it seemed like not much had changed in 137 years. We were accused of partisanship, of bowing to the “gay agenda,” of giving in to pressure to be politically correct instead of just plain correct, of abandoning common sense and Christian tradition. Noah Webster was turning in his grave with shame, I was told. People weren’t just angry; they were frothing mad. “You have crossed the line where you are irresponsible and attempting to pollute the minds of MY CHILDREN…BACK OFF!” one woman warned. I was invited to personally rot in hell no fewer than thirteen times. I was told to get a life, get a fucking life, to fuck off and die, and also to swallow shards of glass mixed in acid. The e-mails were, almost to the letter, uninterested in actually knowing why we entered this new subsense of “marriage.” They didn’t care about the mechanics of language change; they cared about the mechanics of culture change. The existence of this definition was not merely recording a common use of “marriage” (the word); it was a declaration that same-sex marriage (the thing) was possible, and an engine by which same-sex marriage (the thing) would be firmly cemented in our society.

I call it “craft” and not “art” for connotative reasons. “Art” conjures an image of the lexicographer as medium or conduit—a live wire that merely transmits something unkenned, alien. But “craft” implies care, repetitive work, apprenticeship, and practice. It is something that is within most people’s reach, but few people devote themselves to it long enough and with enough intensity to do it well. That sort of dedication to words comes across as batty, so we speak in metaphor.

“The analogy I use,” says Steve Perrault, “is the carpenter. When you first start a project, you’re hesitant: you miss the nail, you don’t know what you’re doing. When you hire a professional, he or she will come in, and what seems like an insurmountable problem to you, they’ve done it before. It’s the same thing for a definer.”