You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  CHAPTER 15 ½

  OUT OF PRINT

  Reference books have a natural life cycle: most have their day and are no more; the lucky few fill a niche and catch on. Time passes, and the work’s shortcomings become clear—whether they were there from the beginning or imposed only by the passage of time. The publisher decides the world needs a revised version, and so appears the second edition. If all goes well, there may be a third, a fourth … A handful of fabulously successful reference works have histories that extend across centuries: Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack has not missed an annual installment in more than a century and a half, Merriam-Webster’s latest dictionaries are part of a direct lineage going back to 1828, and the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française will add its in-progress ninth edition to a series going all the way back to 1694. But most do not last nearly that long—they might get a second, even a third edition, and then they lapse into obscurity.

  This much is natural. Every so often, though, there are episodes that seem to kill off entire genres, the bibliographical equivalent of a biological mass extinction. The Russian Revolution killed off a slew of dictionaries and encyclopedias from the czarist era. The invention of the pocket calculator put paid to the table of logarithms and sines. And we are now in the middle of one of the biggest mass extinctions ever. The name of the invasive species is the Internet.

  Many once-proud reference franchises have fallen in the last few years. The Brockhaus Enzyklopädie traces its genealogy to Renatus Gotthelf Löbel and Christian Wilhelm Franke’s Conversations-Lexikon (1796–1808), and it made it to a twenty-first edition in thirty volumes (2005–6). But after thriving for two centuries, Brockhaus could not figure out how to sell encyclopedias in the digital age. In 2009 they sold the intellectual property and fired the editorial staff. The legendary Britannica has been struggling mightily after several serious missteps since the mid-1990s. The company announced in 2012 that the 2010 version would be the last to appear in print—no surprise, now that printed books have fallen to less than one percent of the company’s revenue.

  Even for titles that have stayed healthy, print publication is unmistakably threatened. The Oxford English Dictionary is an institution, and it is unthinkable that it should shut down operation anytime soon—but the publishers are agnostic on whether there will be any further print editions.1 The situation is the same at Merriam-Webster: a Webster’s Fourth is in preparation, but no one can say whether it will have a physical existence.

  This should not be an occasion for lamentation. Most of the effects of computerizing reference books are unambiguously good. Making them available in electronic form allows for searches that were unthinkable in the past. With the print OED, readers can search only by headword; with the online OED, they can look for all the words that entered English from Arabic between 1400 and 1500. (The answer is nine: Alcoran, athanor, azoth, El Nath, gerfaunt, khan, Ramadan, resalgar, and sebesten.) That would have been the work of years; it now takes seconds.

  Online publication also makes possible much more frequent updates than were possible with books. Some of the most important reference books—the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of National Biography—average one, two, or maybe three editions a century, a pace determined by the world of print. With the references of the future, revisions could appear two or three times a year. It all depends on what we mean by “edition”: the notion of numbered editions may be a relic of print culture that vanishes in the electronic age. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, now in progress, may well be the last one to bear a number; later we may see only OED-of-the-afternoon-of-the-sixteenth-of-June-around-four-o’clock. The benefits of such currency for the users are obvious, though whether the editors and presses want the headaches of managing such perpetual flux, a Trotskyite permanent revolution, is an open question.

  While online publication offers savings in materials, it also introduces new expenses and new challenges. Subscriptions and site licenses are the means publishers have devised to collect money for Internet-based resources, though pricing schemes are still being worked out. But those without institutional support may be shut out of the digital future: those without university IDs, even those with IDs from less affluent universities, may be left in the cold. In the old days, they could use expensive books in a library for free—distinguished professors from Ivy League universities and part-time lecturers at community colleges have always been on an equal footing in the New York Public Library, all drawing on the same resources. But when those resources are linked to student and faculty ID numbers, the computer age may make research impossible for the less fortunate. Some publishers have experimented with individual subscriptions and pay-per-view plans, but prices are almost always beyond the means of private researchers. The stratification of the academic haves and have-nots is already too pronounced, and the brave new research world may only make it worse.

  When Britannica announced the end of their print edition, many declared they will miss the old hard copy. “I know I sound like a crotchety old grandfather on the porch reminiscing about the good old days of rumble seats,” admits journalist A. J. Jacobs, who read the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica, “but I loved having pages you could actually turn, not click or swipe. I adored the literal weight of each volume (4 pounds), which somehow lent it metaphorical gravitas as well. I fell hard for the familiar smell of leatherette covers and the crinkling of the pages.”2 And some educators are concerned that the loss is more than sentimental: “The internet and its search boxes,” a school librarian wrote, “do not encourage a sense of wonder… . We work to create inquiry-driven critical thinking in our students while we systematically remove the tools necessary to stimulate such thought.”3 “I love encyclopedias,” a reference librarian wrote,

  and will miss the printed Encyclopaedia Britannica… . But we live in a complex world, too big for a few hundred people to cover completely, and too fast-moving for print volumes to keep up.4

  But most of those who wipe away a tear of regret have to admit this is what progress looks like.

  CHAPTER 16

  MONUMENTS OF ERUDITION

  The Great National Dictionaries

  Noah Webster

  An American Dictionary of the English Language

  1828

  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

  Deutsches Wörterbuch

  1852–1971

  The French Academy’s Dictionnaire and Johnson’s Dictionary represent different approaches to the idea of a national language: one protected from foreign impurities, based on the “best” literary language, and enforced from on high; the other recognizing the impossibility of ever fixing the language, and concerned only with recording the language as accurately as possible. Dictionaries often reflect the cultures that produce them: since the rise of the modern nation-state in the seventeenth century, lexicographers have worked to reinforce, or even to build, a national consciousness.

  Modern maps suggest that everyone in the area labeled SPAIN speaks Spanish; across the border to the west they speak Portuguese; across the border to the north they speak French. But maps can lie. Before the eighteenth century it was hard to tell how many languages were spoken in Spain or Portugal or France, and where the speakers of one left off and the next began. Dictionaries were partly responsible for consolidating national linguistic consciousness. The Della Cruscan Vocabolario, for instance, played a role not merely in recording but in creating the Italian language: it established a standard form of Italian, based on Tuscan, that would displace the dozens of local dialects spoken around the Italian peninsula. When Peter the Great wanted to consolidate a vast and growing Russia, he ordered his Academy of Sciences to regularize the Russian language with an academic dictionary. The six-volume dictionary published between 1789 and 1794 established vernacular Russian rather than Church Slavonic as the standard.1 The Czech National Revival in part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late eighteenth century led to the publication of a pile o
f reference books, of which Josef Dobrovský’s grammar in 1809 and Josef Jungmann’s Ausfürliches und vollständiges deutsch–böhmisches synonymisch-phraseologisches Wörterbuch of 1834–39—five volumes and 4,700 pages—were the most important.2

  The connection between nation and dictionary may be clearest in Poland. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Commonwealth of Poland had come to an end and the country was partitioned among Russia, Austria, and Prussia, prompting Tadeusz Kościuszko to lead an uprising in 1794. It was defeated, but patriotic Poles held on to their sense of themselves as a nation. One passionate advocate for Poland’s cultural identity was Samuel Bogumił Linde, part of the team that composed one of the first written national constitutions, Poland’s so-called “Government Act” of 1788. Linde’s constitution had a short life—the government it established was disbanded after just a year and a half—but his other contribution was more lasting: the Słownik jzyka polskiego, or Dictionary of the Polish Language, published in Warsaw in six volumes between 1807 and 1814. The first substantial dictionary of Polish, it defined sixty thousand words and provided a focus for linguistic, and therefore national, identity. The nineteenth-century French philosopher Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, knew what he was talking about when he said “Le premier livre d’une nation est le Dictionnaire de sa langue”—a nation’s first book is a dictionary of its language.3

  Samuel Johnson had national ambitions in his Dictionary: “I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of philology to the nations of the continent.”4 Johnson stood for England. Not all English speakers, though, were English, and not all the English-speaking nationalists shared Johnson’s sense of the nation.

  On the other side of the Atlantic one critic had serious complaints about the work everyone else seemed to admire. Noah Webster was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758, three years after Johnson’s work was published. Webster, whose interest in the language was lifelong, found much to like about the Dictionary: Johnson’s “great intellectual powers,” his emphasis on morality, the definitions that let his abolitionist sympathies shine through (both Johnson and Webster despised American slavery). But Webster was an American patriot—at age nineteen he tried to fight in a battle in the American War of Independence in 1777 (though he arrived on the battlefield too late to be useful). Johnson, on the other hand, was notorious for his disparagement of the American rebels, whom he called “a race of convicts,” adding that they “ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” He was willing, he said, “to love all mankind, except an American.”5

  As the loyal American Webster became increasingly interested in the conjunction of language and nation, he came to scorn the English lexicographer whom he viewed not as a precursor but as an enemy. Before the Treaty of Paris officially ended the American Revolution, Webster wrote, “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms.”6 Johnson’s Dictionary, he asserted, was “extremely imperfect and full of error,” and “Not a single page of Johnson’s Dictionary is correct.”7 He therefore decided to produce his own distinctively American dictionary, and he began by publishing a series of books on the English language in America—which he preferred to call “the American language”—in order to “promote the honour and prosperity of the confederated republics of America and cheerfully throws his mite into the common treasure of patriotic exertion.”8 His spellers, grammars, and readers, beginning with the Grammatical Institute of the English Language in 1783, were some of the bestselling books in America for more than a century, selling, by one estimate, a hundred million copies. He wrote essays and pamphlets advocating for spelling reform,9 eager to widen the gap between British and American English: we owe to Webster most of the spellings marked “chiefly American” in modern dictionaries, in pairs like colour/color, centre/center, programme/ program, and so on.

  TITLE: An American Dictionary of the English Language: Intended to Exhibit, I. The Origin, Affinities and Primary Signification of English Words, as Far as They Have Been Ascertained; II. The Genuine Orthography and Pronunciation of Words, According to General Usage, or to Just Principles of Analogy; III. Accurate and Discriminating Definitions, with Numerous Authorities and Illustrations

  COMPILER: Noah Webster (1758–1843)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, abacist to zymome

  PUBLISHED: New York: S. Converse, 1828

  VOLUMES: 2

  PAGES: 1,920

  ENTRIES: 70,000

  TOTAL WORDS: 2.3 million

  SIZE: 11″ × 9″ (28 × 23 cm)

  AREA: 1,320 ft2 (124 m2)

  WEIGHT: 6 lb. (2.8kg)

  PRICE: $20 (promptly lowered to $15)

  LATEST EDITION: Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1961)

  In 1806 he published A Compendious Dictionary. It was written, he said, “for my fellow citizens,” and he had only scorn for those of his countrymen “whose veneration for trans-atlantic authors leads them to hold American writers in unmerited contempt.”10 This was to be an American document through and through. But, though serviceable, it accomplished only a tiny fraction of what Webster hoped. Merely 408 small pages, with no etymologies or quotations, its definitions are skimpy, usually just a handful of synonyms:

  Admit, v. to allow, suffer, grant, let in, receive

  Different, a. unlike, distinct, contrary, various

  Law, n. a rule, order, judicial process, justice

  Moose, n. an American quadruped of the cervine genus very large

  Take, v. took, pret. taken, pa. to receive, seize, trap, suppose, hire, please

  Much of the work was not even original—many entries were lifted whole from John Entick’s New Spelling Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1764.

  Webster knew the limitations of his work, and he turned his attention to a much grander dictionary and worked on it for two decades. A contemporary account showed him at work, using a custom-built

  large circular table … about two feet wide, built in the form of a hollow circle. Dictionaries and grammars of all obtainable languages were laid in successive order upon its surface. Webster would take the word under investigation, and standing at the right end of the lexicographer’s table, look it up in the first dictionary which lay at that end… . He took each word through the twenty or thirty dictionaries, making notes of his discoveries, and passing around his table many times in the course of a day’s labor.11

  An American Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1828, when Webster was seventy. In two stout quartos, it was in most respects the best dictionary of English on the market on either side of the Atlantic. Not all the work was original: though Webster often disparaged Johnson he also leaned on him, adopting many of his definitions verbatim and using others as the basis for his own. But lexicographers today are almost universally agreed that while Webster took much from Johnson, he also surpassed him in the clarity and precision of his definitions. Johnson was a very good definer, but Webster was a great one. He announced that “the great and substantial merit” of a dictionary consists of “the accuracy and comprehensiveness of its definitions,” and he delivered.

  How far Webster came is clear in a comparison of an entry in the Compendious Dictionary with the American Dictionary. This is how Webster handled the word language in 1806:

  Language, n. all human speech, a tongue, a style

  Part of speech and three imprecise synonyms, nothing more. The entry for the same word in the dictionary of 1828 has grown exponentially, and with the length comes greater precision:

  LAN´GUAGE, noun [Latin lingua, the tongue, and speech.]

  1. Human speech; the expression of ideas by words or significant articulate sounds, for the communication of thoughts. Language consists in the oral utterance of sounds, which usage has made the representatives of ideas. When two or more persons custo
marily annex the same sounds to the same ideas, the expression of these sounds by one person communicates his ideas to another. This is the primary sense of language the use of which is to communicate the thoughts of one person to another through the organs of hearing. Articulate sounds are represented by letters, marks or characters which form words. Hence language consists also in

  2. Words duly arranged in sentences, written, printed or engraved, and exhibited to the eye.

  3. The speech or expression of ideas peculiar to a particular nation. Men had originally one and the same language but the tribes or families of men, since their dispersion, have distinct languages.

  4. Style; manner of expression.

  Others for language all their care express.

  5. The inarticulate sounds by which irrational animals express their feelings and wants. Each species of animals has peculiar sounds, which are uttered instinctively, and are understood by its own species, and its own species only.

  6. Any manner of expressing thoughts. Thus we speak of the language of the eye, a language very expressive and intelligible.

  7. A nation, as distinguished by their speech. Daniel 3:29.

  What had been 9 words was now 240. Other pairings are even more extreme: the entry for give was 16 words in 1806, and 1,114 in 1828. In 1806 Webster covered set—noun and verb—in 43 words; in 1828 he took 2,490. The entry for take went from 13 words to 2,524. Joseph Friend calls his definitions “more accurate, more comprehensive, and not less carefully divided and ordered than any previously done in English,”12 and to this day, professional lexicographers admire his definitions and strive to equal them.

  Sales of the first edition were modest—about twenty-five hundred copies. Still Webster carried on, mortgaging his house to raise the money for a second edition. He entered into an acrimonious dispute with one of his former assistants, Joseph Worcester, who published his own Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory English Dictionary in 1830, prompting accusations of plagiarism from Webster and a battle—the “dictionary wars”—that dragged on for decades. Webster’s own second edition appeared in 1840, three years before he died at the age of eighty-four. His work had remarkable longevity, as the G. & C. Merriam Co. bought the intellectual property in Webster’s American Dictionary and began marketing a series of revised and expanded editions: a New Revised edition in 1847, a Royal Quarto Edition in 1864, Webster’s International Dictionary in 1890, Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1909, a second edition in 1934, and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961. The franchise remains the most prestigious in all American lexicography.