by Kory Stamper
* * *
*1 Reader, I flinched.
*2 Coote’s list offered rudimentary definitions; Mulcaster’s list included none. Mulcaster foisted that on someone else—in introducing his word list, he yearns for someone to make a comprehensive dictionary of English for the native English speaker: “The want whereof, is the onelie cause why, that verie manie men, being excellentlie well learned in foren speche, can hardlie discern what theie haue at home, still shooting fair, but oft missing far” (166).
*3 …conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. / With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons. / Whereby they may the more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elswhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues. Good Lord, Cawdrey.
*4 “…COMPREHENDING The Derivations of the Generality of Words in the English Tongue, either Ancient or Modern, from the Ancient British, Saxon, Danish, Norman, and Modern French, Teutonick, Dutch, Spanish, Italian; as also from the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew Languages, each in their proper Characters. AND ALSO A brief and clear Explication of all difficult Words, derived from any of the aforesaid Languages, and Terms of Art, relating to Anatomy, Botany, Physick, Pharmacy, Surgery, Chymistry, Philosophy, Divinity, Mathematicks, Grammar, Logick, Rhetorick, Musick, Heraldry, Maritime Affairs, Military Discipline, Horsemanship, Hunting, Hawking, Fowling, Fishing, Gardening, Husbandry, Handicrafts, Confectionary, Carving, Cookery, &c. TOGETHER WITH A large Collection and Explication of Words and Phrases used in our Ancient Statutes, Charters, Writs, Old Records, and Processes in Law; and the Etymology, and Interpretation of the Proper Names of Men, Women, and remarkable Places in Great-Britain: Also the Dialects of our different Countries. Containing many Thousand Words more than either Harris, Philips, Kersey, or any English Dictionary before extant. To which is added, A Collection of our most common Proverbs, with their Explication and Illustration. The whole Work compiled and methodically digested, as well for the Entertainment of the Curious, as the Information of the Ignorant; and for the Benefit of young Students, Artificers, Tradesmen, and Foreigners, who are desirous thoroughly to understand what they Speak, Read, or Write.” They sure don’t title dictionaries like they used to.
*5 Said murderous nutbar is Dr. William Chester Minor, one of the most prolific and linguistically sensitive readers OED editor James Murray had ever employed, and also a permanent resident of the Broadmoor, England’s best-known asylum for criminal lunatics. Minor was such a great reader because he got his pre-insane start doing the exact same work for the Webster’s folks; his name is found in the preface of Webster’s 1864 American Dictionary of the English Language, Royal Quarto Edition, Unabridged. He was a science editor and, from what we in the office can tell from the correspondence available to us, not a very good one.
*6 “Noah’s view” as expressed here is some hat-waving fustian; in practice, Noah omitted quite a few “vulgar” and “low” terms from his dictionaries.
*7 A portmanteau is a word whose form and meaning are a blend of the forms and meanings of two other words. That’s a stuffy explanation for a fun class of words: consider “smog,” a blend of “smoke” and “fog,” or “brunch,” a blend of “breakfast” and “lunch.” “Portmanteau” is itself a portmanteau: it’s the medieval French word for a large suitcase and is a blend of porter (“to carry”) and manteau (“mantle, cloak”).
*8 “Whatever admiration the world may bestow on the Genius of Shakespeare, his language is full of errors, and ought not to be offered as a model for imitation.”—Noah Webster, the man heralded as “America’s Schoolteacher,” in his 1807 pamphlet A Letter to Dr. Ramsay…Respecting the Errors in Johnson’s Dictionary.
*9 Never, ever “corpuses.” Lexicographers and linguists call them corpora.
*10 There is an entry for “fleek” (no “on”) at UrbanDictionary.com that dates back to 2003 and means “smooth” or “nice,” but as of this writing, Peaches can still lay claim to coining “on fleek.”
*11 Not a mistake: “Reading and marking” looks like a compound subject, which would require a plural verb, but the two actions are taken as one. You don’t read without marking; you can’t mark without reading.
*12 hot-rod∙der n, pl -ders 1 : a hot-rod driver, builder, or enthusiast (MWC11). Now this word can be in your idiolect, and you will be a better person for it.
*13 We generally don’t take citations of spoken English, because it’s too easy to mishear a word you aren’t familiar with or transcribe it with a spelling it doesn’t have; think of all the people who type “beaucoup” as “boku.” But, c’mon: ho-bag. On public radio.
Surfboard
On Defining
Back in the stuffy editorial conference room, Gil leans back in his chair and sucks his teeth. He seems to do this whenever he’s about to embark on a long explanation that he knows will whistle clear over our heads but will contain important information we will need if we get on with this lexicography shtick.
He sucked his teeth a lot that first year.
Today, he announces, we will start talking about definitions—specifically, the kinds of definitions we will be writing and the kind we won’t be writing. “We’ll begin,” he says, “with real defining.”
My fellow new hires and I give each other surreptitious side-eye. We were under the impression that writing definitions for the oldest dictionary maker in America would, you know, constitute real defining. As it turns out, there are several kinds of defining in the 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?” 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. You’d get to stare into the middle distance and palm books of wisdom and decide whether love is an action, a feeling, a myth. From somewhere outside—a passing car, perhaps—you’d hear the strains of music. Rhythms would thump while the KLF asked, “What time is love?” and you would smile, because you are a lexicographer, and only you can tell the KLF exactly what time love is.
This is a happy fiction (it was my happy fiction, in fact). 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. The questions we answer are, “What does ‘beauty’ mean in the sentence ‘She’s a real beauty’?” or “What does ‘love’ mean when someone says they love pizza, and is that the same use of ‘love’ as when they say they love their mom?”
But when people go to the dictionary and look up “love,” they expect to see us explain what it is. You can tell by the comments that people leave at the entry online that they don’t care about all this highfalutin faff (“strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties,” or “attraction based on sexual desire,” or “affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests”):
• L ong O vercoming V alues E ffect ~ love ?
• What is Love?? God is Love! “For God so LOVED the world, that he gave his only begotten son!”
• Love is the desire for something to live to the fullest of its ability.
• Strong magic feeling, which is expressed each another people, and it’s need to all
• I think love is a big con and like religion or so called metaphysics can be moulded into anything people want the word to mean.
• Love is so much more than that
• The meaning of love in your dictionary is wrong. The meaning of love is the Jonas Brothers.*1
The distinction between real defining and lexical defining often sounds like some ass-covering hairsplitting. Lexicographers aren’t saying that the essential nature of love is affection; we’re saying that’s how the word is used. But the speaking, writing public chooses to use the word “love” over “affection” because love signifies something more than affection, doesn’t it? Love has to be different from mere affection.
Lexicographers wobble across this tightrope constantly. Yes, it’s true, the thing love is different from the thing affection, but the word “love” has a bunch of different uses that overlap some of the uses of the word “affection.” If you are a philosopher, that answer is unsatisfying, but it’s the best one that a lexicographer can give.
—
Once budding lexicographers have surrendered their idea of what lexicography is, they must learn the jargon, and it is through mastery of the jargon that they begin to realize how complicated a dictionary entry can be. The word being defined is the “headword”—never do we call it “the word being defined.” The definition is called “a definition” (phew) or “a sense,” particularly when there’s more than one of them. Different senses are marked by sense numbers (1, 2, 3, and so on). Closely related senses can be made into subsenses: those are marked by letters after a sense number (1 a, b, c, d, and so on). Sometimes, if you are very lucky, there are very closely related subsenses that you can link together and subdivide once more into sub-subsenses, which are marked after the subsense letter with a number in parentheses: 1 a (1), (2), b, c (1), ad nauseam. Now, each sense can, within itself, have several equal defining statements, which we call “substitutes” just because there aren’t enough “sub-” words to learn. Substitutes are separated by a boldfaced colon, unless your substitute is a binding substitute (a sort of ur-substitute which is followed by subsenses that are examples or subsets of the binding substitute), in which case it is followed by a lightfaced, roman colon. The whole megillah—headword, senses, subsenses—is an “entry.” And while you learn the lingo, you also know that you will have to code-switch between lexicography jargon (“sense,” “headword”) and words that normal people understand (“definition,” “word”), which is frustrating because you are learning about the precision of language, and here you have to be wicked imprecise in order to communicate with people. This is good practice for learning how to write definitions.
One of the first things you need to do when writing a dictionary is decide if a word merits entry. This is a concept that rankles many people for completely different reasons. As we’ve already seen, many people feel that some words simply don’t deserve to be entered into the dictionary because that somehow legitimizes what they consider to be a piss-poor, wrong usage.
On the other side of the argument are the inclusionists, people who believe that every word in use, ever, should be entered in the dictionary. It doesn’t matter if it was common in 1400 but fell out of use with Shakespeare; it doesn’t matter if it was written down once; it’s a word and it deserves to be entered. Inclusionists have always been around—Webster himself groused about the lack of Americanisms in other dictionaries—but it was easier to silence them when you laid out the strictures of print publishing before them. Few people buy reference books to begin with; the ones who do rarely buy multivolume references; if multivolume references don’t sell, then we must focus on single-volume references; publishing a single-volume dictionary that is twenty inches thick is impossible and cheating.
Once dictionaries began to move online, inclusionists began poking holes in that line of reasoning. Electronic dictionaries have no space restrictions, so why shouldn’t we enter all the words ever used? But we still run into one major speed bump in the quest for an exhaustive dictionary of English: lexicographers are a dying breed. Language, we’ve established, moves much faster than lexicography. There are not enough of us around to even see every word in the language, let alone define every word in the language.
There are a number of open-source dictionaries or online glossaries where people enter their own words and definitions, but the best ones all have one thing in common: they have some sort of editorial staff sweeping up behind the amateur definers. That sounds unbearably snobby, but it’s borne out of long experience with user-submitted definitions. Merriam-Webster has run its own little experiment in the open-source dictionary, allowing people to add a word, its part of speech, a source, and a definition to an online database. It became immediately apparent that people did not natively know how to write a dictionary definition.
Nancy Friedman, a copy editor and commercial naming specialist, sent me a Twitter link to a T-shirt that featured the definition of “hella” (a California adverb that means “very”):
hella
hell•a helǝ
adverb
1. an excessive amount
2. large quantity
3. more than above what is necessary
synonyms:
1. surplus
antonyms:
1. lack, deficiency
No, I e-howled, this is terrible defining! The copywriter managed to get the part of speech and the pronunciation right (both terribly difficult jobs) but then defined an adverb with (1) a noun definition, (2) another noun definition that is missing an “a” and is essentially the same definition as the first one, and then (3) a completely unidiomatic, confusing, vaguely adjectival definition. What the hell does “more than above what is necessary” even mean? “Hella” is so much more that we have to unidiomatically slap synonymous prepositions all over this definition to get that point across? This definition makes as much sense as saying “over over what is necessary,” which is to say, it doesn’t. Try substituting those definitions into a perfectly idiomatic sentence using “hella”:
That album is hella good.
That album is an excessive amount good.
That album is large quantity good.
That album is more than above what is necessary good.
Dude, do you even English? That defining job is hella bad. That’s why lexicographers have to be trained in how to write definitions.*2
—
The one cardinal rule of writing definitions that every lexicographer learns in their first days, but which is completely opaque to the average dictionary user, is that 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. If you include an example sentence, it needs to use that word with the same part of speech that you’ve defined it as.
A word has to meet three criteria for entry into most general dictionaries. It needs first to have widespread use in print, which is part of why lexicographers do all that reading. A word that appears only in Wine Spectator, for instance, is probably not well-known outside the magnum of oenophiles who read Wine Spectator. But if the word shows up in Wine Spectator and Today’s Chemist at Work and VICE and the A.V. Club, then it’s probably well-known enough to merit entry.
A word also has to have a long shelf life, though what constitutes a long shelf life depends on the dictionary that’s being edited, the evidence you manage to find for that word, and the reality of what modern communication has done to language. It’s not necessarily that the language is growing faster today than it did in 1600; no one really knows what sorts of words were being used in 1600 apart from what we have a written record of, so no one can reputably make that claim. It’s more accurate to say that with increased general literacy, better access to printed materials, and the birth of the Internet, where anyone—even a T-shirt company—can publish something online and gain readers, we’re more aware of how quickly language grows. And holy crap, does language grow quickly. 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.
These are dangerous, because no one really knows where a word is going to go, and your judgment call may end up being terrible. In the early 1980s, one of our editors decided that the word “snollygoster,” meaning “an unprincipled or shrewd person,” was not really in use anymore, and to free up some space for something new and exciting, they dumped the entry from the Collegiate. About ten years after that, a notable TV personality began using “snollygoster” because it was the perfect word to describe a politician. America is now on the cusp of a “snollygoster” revival, and, boy, do we feel stupid. We also have to gamble on the tech of the future, which is impossible. Twenty years ago, no one had any idea that the common verb that means generally “to search the Internet for something using a search engine” was going to be “google,” and a tweet was something that came out of a bird’s mouth.
Once you’ve determined that a word has widespread use and a decent shelf life, the third requirement is that it has what we call “meaningful use”—that is, whether the word is used with a meaning. What a dumb criterion, you think: all words are used with a meaning!
Not necessarily. The one that every lexicographer offers as proof is “antidisestablishmentarianism.” It’s a word plenty of people are familiar with, but most of our citational evidence for it is in lists of long words, not in running prose, and when it does appear in running prose, it appears in sentences like “ ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism’ is a long word.” When tasked with prying meaning out of a bunch of citations like that, you quickly discover that “antidisestablishmentarianism” is rarely ascribed a meaning in text. It’s not the only one. “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”—a word that puzzlers and lexicographers call “P45”—sure looks like and sounds like the name of a great disease, and it is entered in our Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, but it does not have any meaningful use. In fact, it appears to have been coined by the president of the National Puzzlers’ League in 1935 just to see if dictionaries would fall for it. We did. We’re a little more careful now.