by Kory Stamper
The definition of “hotel” highlights one of the biggest problems in writing definitions: things change, and you are a lexicographer, not a clairvoyant. Back in the 1950s, when this definition for “hotel” was written, places that called themselves hotels did have some (or all) of these amenities. The lexicographer who wrote this definition evidently wanted to distinguish a hotel from other accommodations (like motels or inns) and thought—reasonably—that mentioning what sorts of services were available at a hotel compared with, say, a motel would help orient the reader. But these details of swank hotel life from 1950 are very different from the modern reality; some things you think are a given about how a word is used and what it means will inevitably change. You must consider every detail, every word you place in a differentia: Is this specific enough while being general enough to allow for change?
You will find, as you read the citations for “surfboard,” that there are plenty of citations about new space-age materials (circa 1980) being used for boards. Is it worth mentioning that surfboards aren’t always wood? You search the definition of your genus term, “board,” to see whether non-wood materials are covered in that definition. They are, but as you scrunch up your face and consider the citations, you get that familiar, crinkling feeling at the back of your brain. When you think of surfboards, you think of wood, and you’d wager that most people who see the word “board” in reference to a big flat thing probably think of wood as well. There’s an awful lot of chatter in your evidence about how amazing these new space-age materials are and—yes, there it is—even mention of them in an NPR interview transcript about the inventor of the surfboard. 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 for maximum gnarliness.
There are other hedges that show up in definitions across all publishing houses: words like “especially” or “specifically” that are used within a definition actually join two separate but very closely linked senses of a word, or “broadly” which does the same thing in reverse.*9 When do you use “broadly” and when do you use “specifically” or “especially”? It is, like much of lexicography, a matter of feel.
With all these devices, it can be easy for the dictionary user and the lexicographer to become lost in the labyrinthine complexity of a word’s differentiae. Differentiae must be restrictive clauses; after all, you are restricting the genus to a specific type. And they are often subordinate clauses—that is, clauses that modify something that came in front of them. You can be as careful as possible and still end up with one of those subordinate clauses hanging there between two clear antecedents:
dog ˈdȯg sometimes ˈdäg noun -s 1 a : a small- to medium-sized carnivorous mammal (Canis familiaris synonym Canis lupus familiaris) of the family Canidae that has been domesticated since prehistoric times, is closely related to the gray wolf, occurs in a variety of sizes, colors, and coat types as a pure or mixed breed, is typically kept as a pet, and includes some used in hunting and herding or as guard animals
Here, which word does the clause “that has been domesticated since prehistoric times” modify? It could be “mammal,” or it could be “Canidae.” But isn’t this sort of microscopic focus on antecedents just arrant nitpicking? Probably not to the person who reads this definition and thinks that all members of the family Canidae have been domesticated since prehistoric times, so it’s totally fine to bring the dingo inside the house.
We all use tricks to organize our differentiae. Sometimes I pull out a pad of paper and chart them to make sure they all refer to the right thing:
That gets more difficult as the definition gets bigger:
I’m sorry, what word were we describing? I got caught up in the dancing compartments again.
“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.”
It’s true. Emily worked on the top ten most looked-up words on our main website, and those ten words took her twelve months to finish. There is only so much you can do in capturing meaning in a definition. “While I definitely get the itch to just quit and move on,” Neil explains, “ultimately there’s a problem to solve with defining, and I ask myself if I’ve come any closer to solving it. It’s like the asymptote on the Cartesian plane: you might get closer and closer to the solution but never reach it.”
He offered a better paraphrase one day when I was complaining about an entry: “Words are stubborn little fuckers.”
* * *
*1 It’s not limited to “love,” either. “I DO NOT THINK A COUCH HAS A BACK OR ARMS. IT IS SIMPLY A FLAT SURFACE TO LIE OR SIT UPON. A CHESTERFIELD IS A SOFA WITH TUFTING USUALLY LEATHER. I WOULDN’T USE DIVAN OR DAVENPORT WHICH I THINK IS ARCANE. LOUNGE IS A VERB. SETTEE IS A SMALL SOFA USUALLY WITH TIGHT UPHLOSTERY INSTEAD OF LOOSE CUSHIONS. SQUABS SHOULD BE EATEN.”
*2 You’ll find a better definition of “hella” on this page. And confidential to copywriters: You can actually hire a lexicographer to write this for you! It won’t cost you an arm and a leg, because we are accustomed to working for hella little compensation.
*3 On either side of a boldfaced colon; after a semicolon that introduces a sense divider like “especially” or “specifically”; after (but not before) a lightfaced colon that is used to mark a series of subsenses; after each definition if followed by a subsequent sense or usage note (which is introduced with an em dash—no space after the em dash, though); between the major elements of the entry, like headword, pronunciation, etymology, date; and, obviously, between the words in a definition.
*4 The medical encyclopedias are always open to gruesome pictures of injury or deformity, made gruesomer by the regulation black band over the patient’s eyes. But it’s not all life sciences’ fault: one co-worker, about three glasses of wine deep, revealed that if he passed the table and saw that the daily medical offering was relatively tame, he’d flip through until he found something suitably gross.
*5 irk n -s 1 : IRKSOMENESS, TEDIUM
*6 For an elucidation on the horrors of defining short words, read the chapter “Take.”
*7 English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.
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*8 All terms are Latin because everything sounds smarter in Latin.
*9 sex∙ism n 1 : prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women (MWC11); man n…1c : a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate speech and abstract reasoning, is usually considered to form a variable number of freely interbreeding races, and is the sole living representative of the hominid family; broadly : any living or extinct hominid (MWC11)
Pragmatic
On Examples
Writing a definition is only half of your entry-related job at Merriam-Webster. The other thing you must do is either write or find example sentences for that definition.
Example sentences are given at an entry in order to illustrate the most common uses of that word. It’s a sly way to give the user a little more information about what sorts of words the headword appears with. For example, “galore” is defined as “abundant, plentiful,” and ends with a usage note: “used postpositively.” Rather than making our dictionary users sigh with frustration and start flipping toward P, we just give an example that explains what “used postpositively” actually means in the real world:
You may notice as you flip through the dictionary that some of the example sentences aren’t even sentences; they’re fragments. That’s a holdover from the print days, when including the subject of a sentence (and the punctuation) might turn a line, which turns the page, which requires a new folio, which swallowed the spider that caught the fly, and so on. This is a reasonable explanation from a production standpoint, and a complete slap in the face to English and literacy from most dictionary users’ standpoints. Teachers will write in and angrily ask how they can possibly teach their students proper grammar and punctuation if the dictionary can’t be bothered to use it?*1 Even that is changing, however: there’s room online to put in both a subject and terminal punctuation, thereby (we hope) saving students of English from utter inevitable idiocy.
You’ll also notice that some example sentences have an attribution and some don’t. These are different types of examples: the unattributed type are what we in the biz call “verbal illustrations,” and the ones with attributions are called “authorial quotations.” The authorial quotations are examples taken directly from our citation files as we’ve collected them. You’d think this is an easy task—after all, we’ve already read through all the citations for this word, and you should just be able to grab one—but like many other things in lexicography, this is not the case.
Finding a suitable quotation for a dictionary entry is near impossible, because quotations used in dictionaries need to meet three main criteria: they need to illustrate the most common usage of the word; they need to use only words that are entered in that particular dictionary; and they need to be as boring as humanly possible. Writers generally want to catch and hold your attention, and so they write things that are full of narrative interest, clever constructions, and tons of proper names. These things are a delight to read, and because of that they make for the worst example sentences possible.
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.
In order to make sure that there’s no lexical cowlick sticking up out of an entry, lexicographers carefully weigh each part of an entry to make sure that the whole thing is balanced, and we pay particular attention to the example sentences and the definitions they are paired with. Which grabs you first? If the definition: good, because that’s what people want. If the example sentence: try again. The example sentence should be less interesting than the definition.
The problem, of course, is that the definitions are generally pretty boring; that is after all the lexicographer’s wheelhouse. “Concerned with or relating to matters of fact or practical affairs : practical rather than idealistic or theoretical,” reads the first definition of “pragmatic.” Yes, very sexy if you are into words with more than three syllables. But for the rest of us, this is Typical Dictionary: no sparks or sizzles here, just matte, bland, and, well, pragmatic. One hopes for a great quotation as just deserts*2 for making it through two polysyllabic definitions, maybe something snarky and biting by Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, W. C. Fields even.
With some words, like “pragmatic,” you soon discover that many writers use the word without quite knowing what it means:
Aren’t politicians supposed to pander? Aren’t they supposed to be pragmatic to a fault—focusing on short-term relief and eschewing serious, long-term problems like reforming the health care system and attacking structural deficits?
You’re a bit confused: Aren’t these politicians “concerned with or relating to matters of fact or practical affairs”? Are shortsighted responses actually “pragmatic to a fault”? Gil didn’t cover American politics in your Style and Defining class. This is just one of 463 citations for “pragmatic.” You feel the day stretch out before you, taffy-wise.
Considering all this, it’s no surprise that looking for a really good quotation to use at the entry takes longer than writing the definition. When I ask Emily about quotations, she confirms that for her it is the “hugely, hugely time-consuming part” of working on an entry. I ask Neil about quotations, and he exhales and crumples a bit, as if I’ve sucker punched him. “I feel like I’m living in the abyss of Google News,” Neil says, noting that most of the resources that we work with at Merriam-Webster aren’t written for lexicography, and so their search capabilities (particularly for lexicographers, who would love nothing more than to be able to search for, say, the transitive use of a common verb) aren’t adequate to the task. They return too many hits to easily and quickly sift through; the meta-data of publication name and date might be wrong; they’re full of false positives for the word you’re looking for. “It’s tricky; it can feel tedious.” Later, he says, “I just accept that I’ll be underwater.” I know the feeling.
In lieu of suitable examples from real writers, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster sometimes write example sentences themselves. This is vastly more difficult than it sounds. Lexicographers are people who are, despite the low pay and the mockery, deeply in love with English—they love to play and muck around in it—and it is very hard not to want to make other people fall in love with English too. So in spite of the interdiction against narrative interest, it occasionally seeps in. The definition of “portly” that means “dignified” includes the sentence fragment
The other big problem with writing your own examples is that you sometimes write out of your own ex
periences, which are often not the experiences of the people who will be reading this dictionary. You may get “obscure” in your batch of defining and decide to add a verbal illustration to the “not well-known” sense of the word, so you go with
You also end up with verbal fatigue—a condition whereupon your sprachgefühl deserts you as soon as you need it the most. When called upon, you not only can’t think of any use that suits the definition, but you completely forget English altogether. Little words, like prepositions and adverbs, slip effortlessly through the sieve that your mind has become, so you write and aren’t sure whether “absorbed by” is actually idiomatic English. Should it be “absorbed with”? You weigh the two mentally, and you even do a corpus search to see which is more common, but you still can’t tell anymore. The word “pragmatic” has ceased to be anything but elaborate chicken scratch. Where your sprachgefühl was, there is only an empty ache where it used to dig its fingers into you.
This is the point at which you slink out of your chair and scuff aimlessly over to someone else’s desk. When they look up at you, you will bleat, “Help, is it ‘absorbed with’ or ‘absorbed by’?” I have sent many an e-mail to Emily and Neil that began, “Help, I can’t English [sic].” 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.