Who wants to be a lexicographer? I do! 
What is a lexicographer? A lexicon is a workbook or dictionary; or the vocabulary of a language, person, specific field, or social class. Graph, of course, means writing. So, a lexicographer is someone who writes the dictionary.
We tend to take dictionaries for granted. When we need one, it is there, all up to date and correct — whether it is printed or online. But dictionaries were not handed down from Mount Sinai all completed. Someone — or some people, to be more precise — had to write them. Someone had to come up with the definitions of all the words, as well as the pronunciations and the etymology, or where the words come from.
I don’t do many book reviews on this blog, but if you are interested in words and language — and if you are reading this blog, I assume you are one of those word people — I think you will love the book I just finished and am going to talk about today.
There are lots of books about words and language. There are grammar books like the ones I write. There are textbooks. There are humorous books. You may have read some of these popular books on language:
- The Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
- Eats Shoots and Leaves
- Woe Is I
- Confessions of a Comma Queen
- Fifty Shades of Grammar and my other books!
- And there are many, many more.
Recently, a reader of mine suggested a book to me: Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr. It sounded fascinating, so I borrowed it from my local library and dug in. Yuck. How can you make a book with this title boring and tedious? I don’t know, but I couldn’t get through it, as much as I wanted to. I looked at the online reviews: most people liked it; a few felt the way I did — that she made an interesting topic boring. So I am not recommending that book, although you may like it.
But I am recommending Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. The author is Kory Stamper, a British lexicographer for Merriam-Webster. What a great read! The book seems to be mostly about written dictionaries. The amount of care, thought, and rigorous updating doesn’t seem to apply as much to the “click generation,” as it is called in the book. In fact, when she was completing the book, which has a 2017 copyright date, the author said that there was a big layoff at Merriam-Webster.
Here are just some of the things she talks about — in language that is inviting and easy to understand:
- As one would assume, lexicographers are not known for their skill at small talk. The office is very quiet.
- People often get annoyed when a definition contains the word that is being defined. We are not supposed to do that, are we? Well, read about why it is done, and how the word surfboard was handled.
- Bitch was a real bitch to define with all its meanings — and trying to make the meanings accurate.
- The English language is messy and illogical. You have probably discovered that by now. It is a democracy: use something enough in a certain way, and the dictionary will add it. If the language didn’t change, it would be a dead language. Think Latin.
- There are new words appearing all the time. Which ones are added? How often is the printed dictionary updated? How long does an update take? You know, they update only certain letters each time. And they keep notes of new and expanded meanings that are kept in a file; there could be hundreds of update notes for a single word.
- Oh, yes, there are arguments and complaints. One was about the word decimate. We take it to mean “completely destroy,” but what about the root dec, which means “ten”? The word originally meant “to kill off one tenth.”
- French and Spanish have official language academies. Does English? Why not? Well, the academies don’t prevent the French and Spanish speakers from using whatever words they want; and the American Heritage Dictionary has created a usage panel for English.
- Merriam-Webster decided to add dates-of-first-use to definitions. That was a separate job from defining. Imagine the research that took! And of course, people would write in with claims of earlier dates they had discovered. In fact, people have written in claiming that they themselves were the first to coin a particular word. The lexicographers and daters found that those claims were for the most part untrue.
- You may make fun of LOL and LMAO, figuring they are not legitimate enough to include in a dictionary. However, initialisms have been around a long time. What about ASAP and RSVP?
- The pronunciation (or pronunciations) of words is a whole other issue! Word by Word devotes several pages to the pronunciation of nuclear. And why nucular might be OK.
- Who would have thought that a word like marriage would begin a huge controversy? You can see where I am going with this. The definition of marriage has changed. What about same sex marriage? How do you define marriage now? How do you define marriage when same sex marriage is legal in some places, but not in others? How do you prevent people from writing in and complaining that their dictionary is taking a political stand? That is a can of worms that is discussed in Word by Word. (And Supreme Court justices have the habit of using dictionaries to make a point.)
- You can imagine that most of the mail lexicographers receive are to point out mistakes. Rarely will anyone write and tell the dictionary is has done a fine job on something.
- The bottom line is still to make a profit. And, of course, technology has had an effect on the painstaking work that lexicographers have done in printed dictionaries that were manually updated and reprinted, rather than just uploaded.
- What does a lexicographer do when laid off? To what are those skills transferable?
I think you might enjoy Word by Word by Kory Stamper.
You might also enjoy this book, which will be available in about a week on Amazon, maybe sooner (ebook will be available for Kindle presale very soon, and the print book will be available everywhere else soon too):
This is quite humorous. My daughter and I have been experimenting with how we say nuclear. One reader wrote that nuclear is only one more syllable that clear, but how many syllables are in clear? Depends on who you ask. I pronounce clear as one syllable and hear it as one syllable – cleer. When I add nu to it, for me it becomes 3 syllables that I say and hear – nu clee er. My daughter says it sounds like two syllables to her nu cleer. Neither of us have ever pronounced it the like nu cu lar, yet when adding the word physics or physicist to it, I have often heard it pronounced nu cu lar physics. Hmm, food for thought, like how you say tomato.
Recently we were discussing the usage of the word casualty. We were watching a TV series that was on 20 years ago and they kept saying things like, “We have 20 casualties, only 5 fatalities. We both though casualties were fatalities. That is the way the news media has used it for years now. To us, a casualty meant the person was dead, but that does not match the dictionaries. In fact, it can be either.
Thanks for the comment. I agree with you on nuclear. Three syllables to my count. The difference between clear and how clear sounds in nuclear may be due to the accent. Yes, casualty is a tricky one. It means lost to service, so not necessarily dead, although we usually assume it to mean the same as fatality.
I have been a lexicographer for many years and was totally overwhelmed with this book — too wordy and too much about how lovely it is to be an lexicographer. With every one of the seven books I’ve written about language, I urge writers to create their own Style Manuals — aren’t dictionaries style manuals, written by a group of like-minded people? “Lexicography” sounds distant and impressive; “My Style Manual” sounds much easier to comprehend and develop.
Thanks so much for the comment – the other side of being a lexicographer. I personally loved the book, but it was all new information to me — and I don’t like anything that makes me wade through something slowly. I agree that writers should make their own style manuals on issues that are optional, such as the Oxford comma, but to me dictionaries and style manuals are different. A dictionary deals with words and their definitions. Style usually encompasses a lot more. I would leave the compiling of dictionaries to the lexicographers.
Kory,
I too have been a lexicographer for many years, but I call it “writing a Style Manual.” For aren’t dictionaries extensive style manuals? (This word means “this” and that word means “that”, according to me or the company I work for. )
As author of seven books on language, beginning with GRAMMAR FOR GROWNUPS (HarperCollins) and continuing to my recent AMERICAN-ENGLISH. In each one, I speak to writers and urge them to create their own Style Manual, in which they note their preferences among all the quarrelsome choices of our American-English language.
I was a member of EuroLex and the Dictionary Society of North America, where I spouted and fumed to get lexicographers to recognize the many choices in our language — but most especially in sexist and nonsexist language. My first book on how to avoid using sexist language was published in 1983, with several published since, including ELEMENTS OF NONSEXIST USAGE (Prentice-Hall) and one in Japanese (can you imagine?).
I hope your new book does well and that you consider using the phrase “style manual” when referring to dictionaries of today.
I just noticed that your note is addressed to the book author, so I won’t comment on this one. However, I think it is interesting, so I will print it here.
Who wants to be a lexicographer? Well, I did, all through college at the University of Chicago, where I majored in English Language, studied under two of the great linguists (Joseph M. Williams and Raven I. McDavid, Jr.), and once attended a symposium composed of the greatest living lexicographers. My college girlfriend even made me a T-shirt that bore the Merriam-Webster logo on the front and the company’s logo (“It’s where the words live”) on the back.
After graduating, I was going to apply to Merriam Webster. But I got cold feet when I discovered that all their lexicographers had advanced degrees.
Thanks so much for your comment. Many of us envy you! Aw, you should have give Merriam-Webster a try anyway. I majored in English , which was Literature; I would much have preferred to major in English language; is it different from linguistics? To satisfy my love for language, I double majored in English (literature) and Journalism.
Arlene,
Yes, majoring in English Language was like majoring in linguistics…but only for one language, of course!
By the way, I, too, recommend Confessions of a Comma Queen. But my fellow language lovers, don’t read the book: Listen to it on Audible. It’s narrated by the author herself, and her prosody brings her colorful style to life.
In one passage, a junior editor has removed a “discretionary” punctuation mark or inflection because it “wasn’t in the dictionary.” But the chief copy editor recognized that without it, readers would be miscued. In the author’s narration, the chief bellows back, “Why did you even LOOK in the dictionary?”
I wish I had majored in linguistics – which they didn’t offer at my school, but I don’t think I would have done it (or know what it was) at the time. I read Confessions of a Comma Queen, which I must admit, I didn’t love. Perhaps it would be better as an audiobook. In fact, with Eats Shoots and Leaves, I saw Lynne Truss on television and loved her; then I read the book and was disappointed. I have actually thought of narrating one of my books – 50 Shades of Grammar – which is composed of these blog posts. I think it might be entertaining, although I cannot see any of my other grammar book as an audiobook!
It would seem that many have been conned by the con in lexicon. I am particularly interested in neologisms. It makes us realise that language is living and evolving all the time
Yes, it is — which really makes sense, despite the fact that some of us grammarians are a little set in our ways. However, it is more that language evolves than the structure and punctuation of communication. Whew!
Arlene,
Another interesting blog! I recently read a book you might find interesting: The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester. It’s the true story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and the relationship between the chief editor and one of his most important early contributors who, as it turned out, happened to be an American surgeon imprisoned in England in an asylum for the criminally insane. It’s a fascinating story that I probably wouldn’t have thought to read if my dentist hadn’t recommended it.
That does sound like an interesting book! I will check it out for sure. Maybe you have the same dentist as I do. He has also recommended books about words to me!
A long time ago when I was in the printing industry, two ladies came to me and asked me to print their magazine which was called ‘The Lexicon’. One of them smugly asked me if I knew the meaning of the word ‘Lexicon’. When I told them, they almost fell out of their chairs. Which could have been tragic for one of them because she was very pregnant. When I asked them why they were so surprised at my answer, they replied that I was the first person to have answered their question correctly. Just shows how very few people look up their dictionary to know the meaning of Lexicon.
You are so right. I remember when I learned what the word meant — and it wasn’t even that long ago! I think — even for us word people — the lex root is difficult to figure out. What has lex- in it? I suppose, thinking about it, that lecture probably does.
Even lexicographers cannot be relied on to define English words accurately.
Perhaps, but they sure try hard — and least they did with printed dictionaries.
Thank you for your very interesting and informative article! I do, however, find the pronunciation of ‘nuclear’ as ‘nucular’ to be rather annoying, especially as I cannot help but associate it with a certain POTUS affectionately known as Bush Jr, who could never pronounce it correctly, even though it has just one more syllable than the word ‘clear’ 🙂
I agree with you about nuclear! Apparently many others say it “incorrectly” as well — and the book said sometimes a certain usage is pronounced in that incorrect way. Go figure!
Informative as always.I have such great respect for dictionaries, even the Urban Dictionary. I appreciate your blog and your book reviews, Arlene. Thank you!
You are very welcome. I now have great respect for dictionaries as well. I really had never thought too much about it.
One of my favorite blogs!
I never thought about who writes a dictionary! I think I want to be a lexicographer now too!
My sentiments exactly! Sounds like such fun. I didn’t include the part when the author told about sitting and reading through magazines to see new usages of words!