Lexicography unbound

THERE is something comforting in a dictionary: right angles, a pleasing heft, reassuringly rigid covers. A new one is tight, a bright sheaf of discoveries yet to be made; an old one is a musty but trusted cosy friend. A good dictionary is the classic school-leaving gift from ambitious parents to their children. A great dictionary might even be passed on through several generations.

But maybe the most reassuring thing about a dictionary is its finite nature. A small dictionary contains all the words you need to know, and a really big one seems to contain all the words in existence. Having one nearby seems to say that the language has boundaries, and reasonable ones at that.

It might surprise dictionary-owners to know that most lexicographers do not think of their subject in this way at all. The decision to impose a page-count on a dictionary is in fact a painful one. Definitions can almost never cover the full complexity of a word, even in huge dictionaries. And even more painful is leaving words out simply for reasons of space.

Many readers think that something is a “real word” if it’s “in the dictionary” (raising the question of which of the hundreds of English dictionaries they mean). But lexicographers don’t like to regard themselves as letting the trusty words in and keeping the bad guys out. Erin McKean, who left traditional lexicography to found an online dictionary, Wordnik, explained why she chose a format that could allow virtually limitless entries: “I don’t want to be a traffic cop!”

Lexicographers prefer to think they are a different kind of cop: the kind in the title of John Simpson’s “The Word Detective”, published in October, a memoir of his time as editor-in-chief of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Mr Simpson’s lexicography career began in the 1970s, scouring books for example usages and writing them down on notecards. (The original OED was published in alphabetically consecutive volumes between 1884 and 1928; Mr Simpson worked on the supplement of new words and meanings.) In 1982 a new boss shocked the then-editor with a plan to computerise the dictionary’s ways: both the lexicographic work itself, with digital research files, and its outcome, an OED on compact disc. But that wasn’t the final shape either: by the end of Mr Simpson’s tenure in 2013, the OED’s flagship product was a website with entries richly linked to one another and updated at regular intervals.

A dictionary is really a database; it has fields for headword, pronunciation, etymology, definition, and in the case of historical dictionaries like the OED, citations of past usages. Its natural home is one that allows the reader to consult it in any way that makes sense. Look up a single word. Or look up all the citations by a single author. Or those which share a root: only such a tool can tell you that the OED knows of 1,011 words ending in –ology, against 508 with –ography.

When a new word like “grok” appears or the meaning of a word like “marriage” expands, as it has recently, readers need not wait for years for a new print dictionary. Once the new word or meaning seems here to stay, it can be added in an instant. The OED is conservative: a rule of thumb is to wait until a word has hung on for at least ten years. But the principle is to catch all of the language in use, and not merely to admit the good words, whatever those are.

Ten years is still a long time. Lexicographers, aware that people still look to them for guidance on what is a “real” word and what isn’t, whether or not they like this role, can still be conservative. Those who long for a conservative dictionary should seek one, but this is not the only way of doing things. “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” first appeared as a chunky three-volume work of historical lexicography in 2010, with over 100,000 entries. But Jonathon Green did not hang up his hat when the books hit the shelves; he went on to add an online edition that was to be continually updated.

At the free-for-all end are the online and completely crowdsourced dictionaries from Wiktionary to Urban Dictionary. Whatever one may think of the latter—which includes terms of rank racist and misogynist abuse as well as a broad fare of drug- and sex-related terms—it is useful, allowing oldies to find out what their kids are talking about. That may be an inversion of the old dictionary, the graduation present—but discovery, in whatever format, is after all what dictionaries are for.