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[johnslat]

"How dictionary-makers decide which words to include


EARLIER this month the Oxford Dictionaries added a number of new words to its online collection. (This is not to be confused with the flagship Oxford English Dictionary.) As usual, Oxford included buzzy internet- and youth-inflected coinages such as "neckbeard", "side boob" and "mansplaining". And as usual, internet commenters seemed nonplussed by what seemed to be a venerable institution (ie, Oxford) validating teenage slang. How do lexicographers decide what goes into the dictionary?

In short, dictionary-makers act more like a fisherman, gathering words with a wide net, than a policeman, keeping out "bad words", as Erin McKean, a lexicographer, formerly of Oxford and now of Wordnik, an online dictionary, put it. Nearly all modern dictionaries are descriptive, in that they seek to find the words people actually use and record them. They are no longer primarily prescriptive in the sense of granting "good" words official status while keeping slang and neologisms out.

But this does not mean that dictionaries include everything. Print dictionaries must trade off size and cost against including enough words for the dictionary to be useful. Such dictionaries naturally omit many extremely rare or scientific words. But lexicographers also wait until a word seems to have wide and enduring uptake before including it. Include a neologism too soon, and the word may have fallen out of fashion before the ink on the first print run is dry. But if words are used for a long enough period by a wide enough swathe of English-speakers, the lexicographers make the judgment call to include the word. This is not the same as approval. Indeed serious dictionaries include foul language and racial slurs.

The internet is radically changing lexicography. So many dictionaries—from both traditional and new publishers—are free online that lexicographers compete to offer features such as audio pronunciations, access to their database of historical citations and so on. Perhaps inevitably, online lexicographers include new words more quickly than their print counterparts do. There is no real space consideration, for one thing. And for some kinds of searches, an online dictionary that does not keep up with new language will be out-competed by other dictionaries that do. For example, Urban Dictionary, an online resource full of scurrilous definitions, included "side boob" in 2005. Pressure from internet dictionaries may have led Collins, an traditional dictionary, to allow Twitter users to vote for a new word to be included—the winner was "adorkable". So it is hardly surprising that even Oxford includes a few "cray cray" (in other words, crazy) new words each year. A final advantage of online lexicography is that over-hasty entries can easily be removed."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/08/economist-explains-15

Regards,
John

[buravirgil]

History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
--Mark Twain

Johnson's dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen. Over the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English "wordbook" by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.

The problem with these dictionaries was that they tended to be little more than poorly organised and poorly researched glossaries of "hard words": words that were technical, foreign, obscure or antiquated. But perhaps the greatest single fault of these early lexicographers was, as historian Henry Hitchings put it, that they "failed to give sufficient sense of [the English] language as it appeared in use."[3] In that sense Dr. Johnson's dictionary was the first to comprehensively document the English lexicon.

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