Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

When the hostile takeover failed, he did the next best thing: he created his own dictionary to right Webster’s wrongs and give America the authority it ...

American Heritage Dictionary rested was its Usage Panel, a group originally of 105 writers, editors, and professors who were convened as a cabal of English experts, people who would decide which particula...

“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.

How about that😃

an acronym is a word that is created from the initial letters or major parts of a compound term whose pronunciation is a word (“NAY-toe,” “SNAF-oo”),

and an initialism is an abbreviation created from the initial letters of a compound term, like “FBI,” whose pronunciation is a collection of letters (“EFF BEE EYE”). “Acronym” gets used of both of these, however, and such use burns the biscuits of some.

Dates at entries were proposed by Merriam-Webster’s then president, Bill Llewellyn, back in the 1980s.

It turned out Llewellyn was right: everybody loves the dates in the Collegiate. So much so that we’ve begun adding them to entries in the Unabridged Dictionary as well.

That’s why dictionaries use a proprietary alphabet*2 full of odd letters

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.

Josh asked where I was from at one point, and when I told him, he said, “Oh, General Western. So you have ‘cot-caught’ merger, and ‘Mary-merry-marry’ merger?” I evidently did, though I didn’t know what those were until he explained that some dialects use different vowels for “cot” and “caught” and for each of the “Marys.”

I wonder if there is a good book on dialects.

Audio prons are one of the great advantages of an online dictionary.

Audio is really helpful.

the pronunciation help was given in a long section of prose at the beginning of the dictionary, sometimes disguised as grammar or orthography or prosody.

James Buchanan’s 1757 Linguae Britannicae Vera Pronunciatio, which he wrote specifically for educating youth. His dictionary is the first to include diacritical marks to help distinguish between long vowels and short ones, as well as accent marks to tell the reader which syllable was stressed.

feels like a bait and switch: after all, we learned as children that if words have the same cluster of letters at the end, they rhyme: hop on pop, cat in the hat. And then we encounter “through,” “though,” “rough,” “cough,” and “bough”—five words that all end with “-ough” and not only don’t rhyme but don’t even have similar pronunciations. But “won” and “done” and “shun” rhyme? Are you telling me Dr. Seuss lied to me about English?

Unfortunately, when foreign words are snatched into English, they are often given pronunciations based on English, not the origin language.

French has five nasal vowels (that is, vowels whose quality changes when followed by an n),

French is an unstressed language, by which I mean that the language itself doesn’t use stressed syllables. English, however, is highly stressed; stress plays a part in distinguishing homographs and meaning, like “PRO-duce” and “pro-DUCE.” Where do we put the stress in a word that’s unstressed? Pretty much all over the place:

That question presumes that there are tons of nonstandard pronunciations out there, when, in fact, there aren’t.

we have included that pronunciation in our Collegiate Dictionary. We give four possible pronunciations of “nuclear” in the Collegiate: \ˈnü-klē-ər\ (NEW-klee-ur), \ˈnyü-klē-ər\ (NYOO-klee-ur), \ˈnü-kyə-lər\ (NOO-cue-lur), and \ˈnyü-kyə-lər\ (NYOO-cue-lur). Those last two—the shudder-inducing \-kyə-lər\ pronunciations—are preceded by an obelus (÷), which is our shorthand way of marking nonstandard but widely used pronunciations in our dictionaries. In the event that you don’t know what the obelus is for,*8 we have a short usage paragraph at “nuclear” that tells you right away that the pronunciations that end in \-kyǝ-lǝr\ are disapproved of by many.

The linguistic process by which “nuclear” became \ˈnü-kyə-lər\ is called “metathesis,” where two phonemes within a word switch positions.*10 This is the process that gave us the standard pronunciations of “iron” (“EYE-urn” instead of “EYE-run”) and “comfortable” (“KUMF-ter-bul” instead of “KUM-fert-uh-bul”) and other nonstandard pronunciations like “PURR-tee” for “pretty.”

Some linguists, including Josh, think that because this variant occurs primarily in contexts like “nuclear weapons” and “nuclear power,” it “suggests that ‘nucular’ may not be an alteration of ‘nuclear’ but formed from adding the ‘-ular’ suffix to the root ‘nuke.’

And each company has its own proprietary alphabet, just to be difficult.

A newish portmanteau of “anecdote” and “data,” “anecdata” refers to personal experiences or anecdotes that are treated like objectively collected and analyzed data.

It’s worth noting that this is a joke from The Simpsons and isn’t representative of how people in Springfield, Massachusetts, say “Springfield.”

This complaint, however, was an onion of suck, layer after layer of problems.

that is a placeholder for their pain, some word that will spare them the inevitable and exhausting explication of their loss to a stranger. We don’t just want our words to have meaning, we want them to mean something, and the difference is palpable.

Is there a word?

those dots in the headwords, like at “co·per·nic·i·um,” are not marking syllable breaks, as is evident by comparing the placement of the dots with the placement of the hyphens in the pronunciations. Those dots are called “end-of-line division dots,” and they exist solely to tell beleaguered proofreaders where, if they have to split a word between lines, they can drop a hyphen.

no, they merely chew wood, not throw it; probably because seven is a sacred or holy number,

borborygmus*1 rumble

It is that the general public—particularly in America—has been trained to think of the dictionary as an authority, and so what “the dictionary” says matters.

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.

Jerkery, like stupidity and death, is an ontological constant in our universe.

The prevailing attitude toward words in the nineteenth century, you will remember, was that right thinking led to right usage, and right usage was a hallmark of right thinking.

dictionary at the price that Webster himself had sold it—twenty dollars, exorbitant for the age.*7 Their first order of business was to revise the 1841 edition of Noah’s American Dictionary into a single-volume dictionary that could be sold for six dollars—a

Noah Webster sounds like a real ass.

Market share was at stake, and so they resorted to the marketing tactics of the nineteenth century: hyperbole and smear.

Things stay the same.

The creation of The American Heritage Dictionary in the 1960s wasn’t just a linguistic response to the Third but a calculated cultural response to it. One ad for the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary showed a long-haired young hippie; the ad copy read, “He doesn’t like your politics. Why should he like your dictionary?”

I never saw that ad anywhere!

Dictionary companies had no problem setting themselves up as an authority on life, the universe, and everything throughout most of their history, because doing so ultimately sold books.

tropes.

heuristic

bor·bo·ryg·mus \ˌbȯr-bə-ˈrig-məs\ n, pl bor·bo·ryg·mi \-ˌmī\ : intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas

It’s another name for a hooded merganser. Don’t worry if you don’t know what a hooded merganser is, because that doesn’t detract from the wonder of “hootamaganzy.”

It makes perfect sense that Justice Scalia would have preferred The American Heritage Dictionary, because he was a member of its Usage Panel.

The firewall between “imply” and “infer” is a fairly recent invention; the two words have had close meanings since at least the seventeenth century, when that slacker Shakespeare used “infer” to mean “imply” and vice versa.

rassling

Non standard spelling of wrestle..rassle

“Experience has a great deal to do with competence,” Steve says.

Funk & Wagnalls, Random House, Encarta, and Century are just a few of the dictionary publishers who have ceased operations in recent history.

Encarta is no longer in business!

cri de coeur

What is this?

huge tracts of land: King of Swamp Castle (on his son’s imminent marriage to Princess Lucky): We live in a bloody swamp. We need all the land we can get. Prince Herbert: But I don’t like her. King of Swamp Castle: Don’t like her? What’s wrong with her? She’s beautiful, she’s rich, she’s got huge…tracts of land. (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, directed by Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, 1975)

Elster, Charles Harrington. The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide for the Careful Speaker. 2nd ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.