Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

that sounds: medieval Icelandic family sagas.” It did sound insane, but it sounded far

1806 with the publication of Noah Webster’s first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and officially back to 1844, when the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Webster’s dictionary after his death.

one of those new one-cup jobbies that hiss like an angry lizard.

People prairie-dog over the tops of their cubicles and call to their co-workers: “Hey, you going for a walk at lunch today?”

Love this "prarie dog over the top" Need to remember and use.

They are word nerds who spend the better parts of their lives writing and editing dictionary definitions, thinking deeply about adverbs, and slowly, inexorably going blind. They are lexicographers.

Ahhh...

English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive into it, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air.

what a lovely metaphor🐢

When you finish defining, you must copyedit; when you finish copyediting, you must proofread; when you finish proofreading, you must proofread again, because there were changes and we need to double-check.

Sounds familiar.

A dictionary is out of date the minute that it’s done.

Understatement.

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).

All in a sock drawer. Ex ellant🐄

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

True.

the dictionary merely records the language as people use it

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.

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.

The idea that “poor” marks quality whereas “bad” marks morality is truly a peeve beyond all other peeves—

Latin and French had written forms that stood independent of their pronunciation; English, on the other hand, was entirely phonetically spelled.

Interesting.

“usage,” like when to use “will” and when to use “shall” (“Will, in the first person singular and plural, promises or threatens; in the second and third persons, only foretells; shall on the contrary, in the first person, simply foretells; in the second and third persons, promises, commands, or threatens”)

I never thought either word imppied a threat. Huh..and it reverses in first and third person.

“it has” (“and it’s come to pass,”

the contractive “it’s” was a misuse and mistake for the contraction “ ’tis,” which was the more standard contraction of “it is.” This was a war that the pedants lost: “ ’tis” waned while “it’s” waxed.

Tis true.

English grammar is not

Latin grammar. The languages are cousins, but not close ones, because they come from different branches of the Indo-European language tree. 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.

diktat

Not to be cofused with dictate. This is a great word.

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. Under this mentality, the idea that the best practices of English change with time is anathema.

Samuel Johnson

If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated:

*2 on·y·mous \ˈänəməs\ adj : bearing a name; especially : giving or bearing the author’s name <an onymous article in a magazine> (MWU)

*5 MOTH [aside]: They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. COSTARD: O! they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the head as “honorificabilitudinitatibus”: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon. (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.1.36–42)

Better than supercalifragilisticexpialidosious

“Juggernaut” is an adaptation of one of the Hindi names for Vishnu, Jagannāth, “lord of the world.” Supposedly, a giant

There are a few flaws in this system. The first is that the customer writing to us generally believes the prescriptivist

misconception that dictionaries are gatekeepers for the language, and so when they write in, it is to froth in rage all over us at our inclusion of any word they think is unworthy. The second flaw in this system is that the person who must deal with this hysteria and give a good, calming account of why that word is in a dictionary is someone who has taken this job specifically because it promises almost no human interaction.

Logic be damned: everybody knows that the more syllables you slap onto a word, the smarter you sound.

once again..sound smart..even if it is ridiculous😃

African-American Vernacular English, for

AAFE African American Vernacular English

“Irregardless” wasn’t just a static irritation: it was an active force of language growth.

This particular construction is a marker of the local dialect (and also happens to be a marker of Canadian English). It’s usually used with the participles “done” (as above) and “finished” (“I’m finished my burger”), though I also hear it with the participle “going” (“I’m going Emily’s house”).

The problem was that she was answering them in AAVE, a dialect whose speakers are often painted as ignorant and uneducated. The white jury interrupted proceedings several times and claimed they could not understand her, and the defense attorney questioned one part of a pretrial deposition she gave concerning what she heard during the struggle.

pot∙a∙mol∙o∙gy \ˌpätəˈmäləjē\ n, pl -gies : the study of rivers (MWU)

So Cawdrey has two lexicographical claims to fame: first proper monolingual English dictionary, and originator of the great lexicographical tradition of plagiarism.

First was Nathaniel Bailey, whose 1721 An [sic] Universal Etymological English Dictionary*4 not only included everyday words but also gave extensive histories, notes on various uses, and stress marks so people would know where to put the emphasis on a word they might have only read. It was aimed at everybody—students, tradesmen, foreigners, the “curious,” and the “ignorant”—and accordingly included a good number of taboo and slang words, including “cunt” and “fuck” (both coyly defined in Latin, not English). Bailey’s dictionaries were wildly popular.

I can imagine.

For hundreds of years, “bored” was always paired with “by” (“I’m bored by your grammarsplaining

“with” (“I’m bored with your grammarsplaining”), but in recent years lexicographers began to notice that “bored” was beginning to be paired more with “of.”

a word like “as,” which has five parts of speech.

to search the Internet for any glossed word—that is, a word that is explained in running text right after its first use, like this.

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.

Kyrie eleison.

Greek. Lord have mercy.

*9 Never, ever “corpuses.” Lexicographers and linguists call them corpora.

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.

Context not philosophy

nouns need to be defined as nouns; verbs as verbs; adjectives as adjectives; and adverbs as something vaguely adverbial, if you can. Every part of the entry needs to match its function.

“snollygoster” because it was the perfect word to describe a politician.

snollygoster...wonder where that word came from?

We trot this rubric out all the time as lexicographers—widespread, sustained, and meaningful use—and then follow up with “If a word meets the criteria for entry, then it’s time to draft a definition.”

formulaic definition. You know what these are: they’re dictionaryese. “Of or relating to” blah-blah-blah; “the quality or state of” yadda yadda; “the act of” et cetera.

you’ll find that A, B, C, and D make up about a quarter of your dictionary. E, F, and G are middling. H is long; we can chalk that up to the surprisingly large number of words that begin with “hand-” and “hyper-.” I, J, and K are relatively tiny. Then you begin the long middle section of the alphabet: L, M, N, O, and P, which always seem longer than they should be, probably because they go by so quickly in the ABC song. Q is a barely registered dip in the road, and you’re back into R, velocity maintained, corners rounded. T is a decent size, and U surprises you (all those “un-” words). V is a comparative breeze; W is about as long as it sounds—double U. X, Y, and Z are nothing, nada, the long stretch after the marathon.