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Lexicography - An Introduction
Lexicography - An Introduction
Howard Jackson
Preface vii
Dictionaries cited ix
1 Words 1
4 The beginnings 31
8 Meaning in dictionaries 86
References 184
Index 189
Preface
Much has happened, both in respect of the making of dictionaries and in respect
of their academic study, in the twelve or so years since my previous book
on dictionaries (Words and Their Meaning, Longman, 1988). Then, the ‘corpus
revolution’ (Rundell and Stock 1992) had only just begun – Words and Their
Meaning just managed to catch the first (1987) edition of the Collins COBUILD
English Dictionary. Now virtually all dictionaries published in the UK make
some claim to have used a computer corpus in their compilation. Not only have
learners’ dictionaries developed by leaps and bounds – the Oxford Advanced
Learner’s Dictionary was in its third edition then, now in its sixth, and the Cam-
bridge International Dictionary of English was still a long way off – but native
speaker dictionaries have also seen significant developments – the publication
of the New Oxford Dictionary of English in 1998, as well as three editions of the
Concise Oxford, not to mention the second edition of the great OED in 1989
and the beginning of the massive revision that will result in the third edition,
planned for 2010.
Dictionaries have also appeared during the period in electronic format, nota-
bly as CD-ROMs, opening up new possibilities, not only in how dictionaries
can be used and exploited, but also in how dictionary material can be organised
and presented. Dictionaries are also accessible online, through the internet,
including the OED, enabling subscribers to view the revisions that will consti-
tute the third edition, as they are posted quarterly.
The study of lexicography has also developed and flourished during the last
dozen years. They saw the launch of the highly successful International Journal of
Lexicography in 1988, for the first ten years under the editorship of Robert Ilson,
and latterly that of Tony Cowie. The mighty three-volume Encyclopedia of Lexico-
graphy (Hausmann et al. 1989–91) delineated the state of the art, and the Diction-
ary of Lexicography (Hartmann and James 1998) mapped the territory. More
recently, Reinhard Hartmann’s Teaching and Researching Lexicography (2001) has
set the agenda for the business of academic lexicography. And Sidney Landau
has updated his readable Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (second
edition, 2001) with its transatlantic perspective.
It is time for a new treatment of the subject in the UK. I am grateful to Louisa
Semlyen and to Routledge for taking this on. The book is dedicated to all the
viii Preface
final-year students who have enabled me to develop the material by taking
my ‘Lexicography’ module on the English degree at the University of Central
England in Birmingham over more years than I care to recall.
Howard Jackson
Birmingham
August 2001
Dictionaries cited
The following dictionaries are mentioned in the course of this book. (Note: a
superscript number, e.g. 19882, refers to the edition; in this case, the second
edition published in 1988.)
Thematic dictionaries
A Thesaurus of Old English (1995) compiled by Jane Roberts and Christian Kay,
with Lynne Grundy.
Longman Dictionary of Scientific Usage (1979) compiled by A. Godman and E.M.F.
Payne.
Longman Language Activator (1993) edited by Della Summers.
Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (1981) compiled by Tom McArthur.
Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), Longmans, Green and Co.
The Scots Thesaurus (1990), edited by Iseabail McLeod.
Abbreviations
In order to save space, dictionaries regularly cited will usually be referred to in
the course of the book by the following abbreviations:
1 Words
want, wanting, wanton, wapentake, wapiti, War., war, waratah, war baby,
warble1, warble2, warble fly, warbler, warby, war chest, war crime, war
cry, ward, -ward, war dance, warden, warder, ward heeler, ward of court,
wardrobe.
A number of items in this list do not quite match our usual concept of what
constitutes a word, which is – I suggest – ‘a sequence of letters bounded by
spaces’. Indeed, only 15 of the 25 items could be described in this way. Two
of the remaining items are less than a full word: the abbreviation War. (for
Warwickshire), and the suffix –ward (used to form words like backward, skyward –
see Chapter 2). The other eight items all consist of more than one ‘word’:
seven of them have just two words, and one has three (ward of court). You
will also have noticed that one word (warble) is entered twice. So, just what is
a ‘word’?
The word before want in the COD10 list is wannabe. Is that a word, or is it
three (want to be)? In our usual concept of a word, it is one, because it is a
sequence of letters bounded by spaces. This conception of words comes, of
course, from writing, the medium in which we are most conscious of words;
and dictionaries are based on the written form of the language. In speech, though,
words are composed of sounds and syllables, and they follow one another in the
flow of speech without spaces or pauses. We make no more pause in saying war
baby than we do with wardrobe, even though the first consists of two words in
writing and the second of only one.
2 Words
There is, clearly, a measure of confusion here that needs some sorting out in
a book about words and dictionaries. Let us make the following distinction of
terms:
A lexeme may, therefore, consist of more than one orthographic word, as warble
fly, war chest, ward of court. Even though they are listed as headwords, we should
exclude abbreviations and affixes (see 1.6 below) from the category of lexeme.
bow, curate, denier, irony, prayer, refuse, reserve, sow, supply, wind.
You will notice that most homophones arise because vowel sounds that used to
be pronounced differently, as represented by the spelling, have in the course of
historical sound changes come to be pronounced the same.
The verb talk represents the ‘regular’ paradigm, where the past tense and the
past participle have the same form, with the –(e)d suffix. The verb sing is one of
a number with ‘irregular’ inflections.
There is a sense in which sing, sings, sang, singing and sung are all the ‘same
word’; they are different manifestations of the same lexeme, variants chosen
4 Words
according to the grammatical context of the lexeme. For example, if the subject
of a sentence is a ‘third person singular’ (equivalent to he, she or it) and the
speaker/writer has chosen present tense, then the form of the verb will be sings
or talks, with the ‘s’ suffix marking the ‘third person singular present tense’ (e.g.
‘until the fat lady/she sings’) We need a further term to distinguish this type of
‘word’:
Note that the three inflected forms of girl (the ‘regular’ paradigm) have the same
pronunciation.
Some adjective lexemes in English have a ‘comparative’ and a ‘superlative’
form. The adjectives concerned are ‘gradable’ (e.g. long, quick, small), rather
than ‘ungradable’ (daily, mortal, sterile). Most gradable adjectives that are one-
syllable in length can have these forms, as may most two-syllable gradable adjec-
tives. The regular inflection for the comparative is –er, and for the superlative
–est (e.g. longer/longest, quicker/quickest, smaller/smallest). There is a very small
number of irregular forms: good, better, best; bad, worse, worst. An alternative way
of expressing comparison, applied to some two-syllable adjectives and to nearly
all gradable adjectives of three syllables or more, is with the adverbs more and
most (e.g. more/most skilful, more/most treacherous). Summarising, the word-forms
of (some) adjective lexemes are:
Words 5
base slow good
comparative slower better
superlative slowest best
age of consent, cash on delivery, chapel of rest, home from home, hostage
to fortune, man about town, meals on wheels, place in the sun, rite of
passage, skeleton in the cupboard.
athlete’s foot, banker’s card, collector’s item, fool’s paradise, hair’s breadth,
lady’s finger, ploughman’s lunch, potter’s wheel, saint’s day, smoker’s cough,
traveller’s cheque, writer’s block.
A third phrasal structure consists of two words of the same type (noun, verb,
adjective) joined by the conjunction and. These are sometimes called ‘binomials’.
Here are some examples:
bells and whistles, black and white, bow and scrape, down and out, fast and
furious, hammer and tongs, nip and tuck, pins and needles, rock and roll,
sweet and sour, ups and downs, you and yours.
6 Words
There are also a few cases of ‘trinomials’, e.g. hop, skip and jump; hook, line and
sinker. You will notice that a number of these items are used metaphorically:
hammer and tongs has nothing to do with the literal instruments used by the
blacksmith, but refers to the intensity or vigour with which something is done.
A fourth kind of phrasal lexeme consists of a verb + adverb (sometimes called
a ‘particle’), to form what are called ‘phrasal verbs’. Here are some examples:
break up, calm down, find out, give in, look over, pass out, show up, take
off, waste away, wear out.
Some of these phrasal verbs have a literal or near-literal meaning, others are
more-or-less figurative in meaning. In one of its meanings, take off is literal (e.g.
referring to aircraft leaving the runway), in another it is figurative (in the sense
of ‘imitate’).
A fifth kind of phrasal lexeme, if indeed we can count them as lexemes, are
typically metaphorical or figurative in meaning. They are idioms, which have
a range of structures from phrase up to whole sentence. An idiom has two
essential characteristics: its meaning is more than the meaning of the sum of its
parts, and usually figurative; and it has a relatively fixed structure. The idiom a
storm in a teacup (American English equivalent a tempest in a teapot) has the figurative
meaning of a ‘fuss about nothing’, and there is no possibility of substituting or
adding anything to its structure. In pull the wool over someone’s eyes, the meaning
is figurative (i.e. ‘deceive’), and the only substitution possibilities are appropri-
ate inflections for the verb pull and an appropriate possessive noun or pronoun
in the place of someone’s. Idioms are all pervasive in language and show a diver-
sity of form and meaning (see Fernando and Flavell (1981) for a fuller treat-
ment). Here are a few more examples from English:
know which side one’s bread is buttered, at the drop of a hat, go against the
grain, come to a pretty pass, take someone for a ride, spill the beans, throw
the baby out with the bathwater, walk on eggshells.
You will notice that in some cases (e.g. take someone for a ride) a literal interpre-
tation is also possible. Only the context will reveal whether the literal or the
metaphorical (idiomatic) meaning is the intended one.
• nouns are the largest class by far; they represent the animate and inanimate
objects that are the participants in sentences as subjects, objects, etc. (beauty,
cat, leaf, niece, nonsense, water)
• verbs represent the action, event or state that the sentence is about, and hold
the pivotal position in the sentence, determining which other elements
need to be present (break, decide, fall, have, keep, love)
• adjectives occur in front of nouns as descriptive words, as well as after verbs
like be with a similar function ( feeble, gigantic, lazy, new, rough, vain)
• adverbs are a diverse class, in part representing circumstantial information
such as time (again, always, sometimes, soon) and manner (clearly, efficiently,
quickly, tentatively), in part acting as modifiers of adjectives or other adverbs
(quite, somewhat, very), in part forming connections between sentences (how-
ever, moreover, therefore).
The four smaller word classes, whose major function is to link the members of
the larger classes together in sentence structure, are:
• pronouns stand for nouns and their accompanying words (noun phrases) to
avoid unnecessary repetition, including personal pronouns (I, you, he, she,
it, we, they), possessive pronouns (mine, yours, hers), reflexive pronouns (my-
self, yourself, themselves), relative pronouns (who, whose, which), indefinite
pronouns (someone, nobody, anything)
• determiners accompany nouns and are subdivided into ‘identifiers’ and ‘quan-
tifiers’; identifiers include the articles (a, the), demonstratives (this, that) and
possessives (my, your, her, our, their); quantifiers include the numerals (two,
five; second, fifth) and indefinite quantifiers ( few, many, several)
• prepositions combine with nouns or noun phrases primarily to form pre-
positional phrases (at, for, from, in, of, on, over, through, with)
• conjunctions are used to connect clauses or sentences, but also phrases and
words; they include the co-ordinating conjunctions (and, but, or) and a
larger number of subordinating conjunctions (although, because, if, until, when,
while).
You should consult a grammar book if you need a more extensive explanation
of the word classes.
bed, dream, go, in, over, please, shallow, treat, usual, vote, whole, yellow.
Each of these words has, as one of its morphemes, a ‘simple’ word from the
earlier list, which forms the ‘root’, or in the case of compounds like bedroom one
of the roots, of the word. The root morpheme is the kernel of the word, with
the main meaning, which is modified by other morphemes in various ways.
Compounds are composed of two or more root morphemes: bedroom, live-in,
overland, wholemeal. These compounds have a variety of structures in terms of
the word class membership of the roots: noun + noun, verb + preposition,
preposition + noun, adjective + noun. Many compounds are like bedroom, where
the first part modifies the second and the word class of the compound is that of
the second part, in this case a noun: a ‘bedroom’ is a kind of ‘room’. The other
three compounds are different: live-in, with a preposition as second part, is an
adjective (as in a live-in nanny); overland, with a noun as second part is either an
adjective (an overland journey) or an adverb (we’re travelling overland); and whole-
meal, again with a noun as second part, is an adjective (wholemeal bread).
The other words in the list are all composed of root + affix. ‘Affix’ is the
general term for morphemes that cannot be used by themselves as simple words;
they only occur ‘bound’ to another morpheme. If they occur before the root,
and so are bound to the right, they are called ‘prefixes’ (e.g. dis- in displease). If
they occur after the root, and so are bound to the left, they are ‘suffixes’ (e.g.
-ish in yellowish). Note that, when writing affixes, the convention is to put a
hyphen on the side where the affix is bound, i.e. to the right of prefixes and to
the left of suffixes.
Some of the suffixes mark ‘inflections’ (see 1.3 above): go-ing (present parti-
ciple), shallow-est (superlative), voter-s (plural). There are no inflectional prefixes
in English. The resulting words are ‘word-forms’ (inflectional variants) of the
root lexeme.
The other affixes represent ‘derivations’. The addition of the affix creates a
new, derived lexeme. We would expect it to be entered in a dictionary some-
where, though, as we shall see (Chapter 8), dictionaries vary in how they treat
derivations. The addition of a suffix usually changes the word class of the root,
though a prefix rarely does:
Note that an inflectional suffix, e.g. the plural ‘s’ on voters, is always the final
suffix in a word.
We might conclude from our discussion of morphemes so far that roots are
always ‘free’ (i.e. can occur as simple lexemes), and affixes are always ‘bound’
(i.e. they need a root to attach to). However, there is a certain set of words in
English, mostly compounds, that have bound roots. Here are some examples:
These lexemes are formed from (bound) roots that are taken from the classical
languages (Greek and Latin) and put together to form, for the most part, new
words that were unknown in classical Greek and Latin. They are known as
‘neo-classical compounds’, and their parts are called ‘combining forms’. Our
examples are formed as follows:
Some roots from the classical languages occur in derivations, when they are also
bound, e.g. chron-ic, graph-ical, naut-ical, neur-al, path-etic.
To summarise:
In Chapter 1, we examined the ambiguity of the term ‘word’ and suggested a set
of terms for resolving the ambiguity. We also outlined the morphology of the
word in English and proposed terms for talking about the structure of words.
This chapter makes a further contribution to the lexicology (study of words) of
English, before we move on to the study of dictionaries (lexicography) in the
next chapter.
2.2.2 Derivatives
The addition of a derivational prefix or suffix to a lexeme forms a derivative.
The lexeme may be ‘simple’ (i.e. a single morpheme), or it may be a compound,
or it may be a derivative already; e.g. care-ful, landscape-(e)r, national-ity. Some
derivational affixes have their origin in Anglo-Saxon (e.g. -ful, -er), others have
come from French or Latin (e.g. -al, -ity); and while there is a tendency to use
Anglo-Saxon affixes with Anglo-Saxon roots and Latinate affixes with Latinate
roots, some mixing does occur, e.g. beauti-ful, preach-er (Latin root + Anglo-
Saxon suffix), fals(e)-ity, ship-ment (Anglo-Saxon root + Latin suffix).
Facts about words 13
Prefixes, of which usually not more than one is added to a root, do not
normally change the word class of the item to which they are added. Common
prefixes include those with a ‘negative’ or ‘opposite’ meaning, such as dis-, in-
(and its variants il-, im-, ir-), un-, the ‘again’ prefix re-, the ‘attitude’ prefixes pro-
and anti-, and the self- prefix. Here is an example of each: dis-please, in-decision,
il-legible, im-patient, ir-reversible, un-certain, re-read, pro-life, anti-freeze, self-addressed.
Suffixes are numerous and usually change the word class of the item they are
added to. Changing verbs to nouns are: -er (the ‘doer’/‘agent’ suffix), -(t)ion,
-ment, -ance; e.g. bak(e)-er, educat(e)-ion, enjoy-ment, perform-ance. Changing adjec-
tives to nouns are: -ity, -ness; e.g. sincer(e)-ity, smooth-ness. Changing adjectives
to verbs are: -en, -ify, -ise; e.g. thick-en, solid-ify, internal-ise. Changing verbs to
adjectives are: -able/-ible; e.g. avoid-able, collaps(e)-ible. Changing nouns to adjec-
tives are: -al, -ful, -ly; e.g. cultur(e)-al, hope-ful, friend-ly. And changing adjectives
to adverbs is: -ly; e.g. quick-ly, smooth-ly. More than one derivational suffix may
be added to a root, e.g. friend-li-ness, recover-abil-ity, care-ful-ly, nation-al-is(e)-
ation.
A special type of derivation occurs which changes the word class of a lexeme
but does not add a suffix. It is called ‘conversion’. For example, bottle is primarily
a noun, but it is used as a verb, with the sense ‘put into a bottle’, by conversion.
A contrary conversion would be catch, where the verb can also be used as a
noun. There are many cases of conversion (e.g. dirty (adjective to verb), skin
(noun to verb), spill (verb to noun), spoon (noun to verb) ) and it is still a produc-
tive process, especially from nouns to verbs, e.g. doorstep, handbag, progress, show-
case, text-message.
A minor type of derivation is ‘backformation’, a kind of derivation in reverse,
in which a supposed affix is removed from a word. This is how the verb edit was
derived from the noun editor, by removing the supposed ‘doer’ suffix -or (com-
pare actor, advisor). A similar backformation derived babysit from babysitter,
commentate from commentator, malinger from malingerer, scavenge from scavenger.
Automate was derived by backformation from automation, destruct from destruc-
tion, enthuse from enthusiasm, greed from greedy, sedate from sedation, televise from
television.
2.2.3 Acronyms
A minor, but nevertheless much used word formation process takes the initial
letters of a phrase and creates a word, called an acronym. Either the acronym
is pronounced as a normal word (e.g. AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency
Syndrome), UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation) ), or the letters are spelled out (e.g. ATM (Automated Teller
Machine), HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) ). Sometimes the two forms
are combined, e.g. CD-ROM (Compact Disc – Read Only Memory). The
acronym is usually spelt with capital letters, but a few acronyms no longer
betray their origin in this way, e.g. laser (‘light amplification by stimulated emis-
sion of radiation’). Here are some further examples, first of ‘said’ acronyms:
14 Facts about words
DAT (Digital Audio Tape), DWEM (Dead White European Male), MIDI
(Musical Instrument Digital Interface), SIMM (Single In-line Memory Mod-
ule); then of ‘spelled out’ acronyms (also called ‘initialisms’): BSE (Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy), CSA (Child Support Agency), FAQ (Frequently
Asked Question), HTML (HyperText Markup Language), LMS (Local Man-
agement of Schools).
A further type of acronym is formed by taking the first syllable of the words
of a phrase, e.g. biopic (biographical picture), infotech (information technology),
Ofsted (Office of Standards in Education), pixel (picture element). In the case
of Ofsted, the second element (st) does not consist of the full syllable, and an x
has been added to pixel to join the two syllables. These ‘syllabic acronyms’ are a
relatively rare formation.
2.2.4 Loanwords
When a word is ‘borrowed’ from another language and added to the vocabu-
lary, it is a ‘loanword’. Some loanwords continue to betray their origins, either
in their spelling or their pronunciation, or both (e.g. blitzkrieg (German), kibbutz
(Hebrew), spaghetti (Italian) ); while others have become naturalised (e.g. coach
(Hungarian), gong (Malay), tycoon ( Japanese) ).
Words have been borrowed into English for a number of reasons. After the
Norman conquest, a new language was imposed on top of the English, and so,
for example, beef, mutton and pork appeared alongside cow, sheep and pig. During
the Renaissance, excessive admiration for Roman and Greek cultures and lan-
guages led to the borrowing of words from Latin and Greek to remedy what
was felt to be a lack in English of erudite vocabulary; and so abscond was bor-
rowed alongside hide, calculate for count, emporium for shop, manuscript for book,
protect for ward, transgress for sin, valediction for farewell.
When the explorers and colonists went to new countries, experienced differ-
ent foods, and came into contact with plants and animals they had never en-
countered before, they often took the words for these things from the local
languages. So, we have chipmunk from Algonquian (in North America), kooka-
burra from Wiradhuri (in Australia), kiwi from Maori (in New Zealand), chutney
from Hindi, poppadom from Tamil, lychee from Chinese, sushi from Japanese,
impala from Zulu, sherbet from Turkish, and so on. Through the centuries,
when a culture has been admired for its prowess in a particular area, English has
borrowed its words for that topic; e.g. musical terms from Italian (concerto, opera,
soprano, tempo), culinary terms from French (casserole, fricassee, au gratin, purée,
sauté).
When a profession has sought an erudite vocabulary to mark off its supposed
area of competence, it has usually looked to the classical languages for its jargon.
The law, for example, has taken many terms from Latin, such as: ad litem (‘in a
lawsuit’), bona fide (‘with good faith’), corpus delicti (‘body of offence’), ejusdem
generis (‘of the same kind’), in personam (‘against the person’), lis pendens (‘a
lawsuit pending’), obiter dictum (‘a passing remark’ – by a judge), prima facie (‘at
Facts about words 15
first impression’), subpoena (‘under penalty’ – i.e. to attend court), ultra vires
(‘beyond (one’s legal) power’). Medicine, on the other hand, has tended to look
more to Greek for its jargon: an inflammatory disease ends in -itis (bronchitis,
peritonitis), a surgical removal ends in -ectomy (hysterectomy, vasectomy), the medi-
cal care of particular groups ends in -iatrics ( geriatrics, paediatrics).
English continues to enhance its vocabulary by taking in loanwords from
languages around the world. Some recent borrowing includes: balti (Urdu), ciabatta
(Italian), gite (French), intifada (Arabic), juggernaut (Hindi), karaoke ( Japanese),
nouvelle cuisine (French), ombudsman (Swedish), paparrazi (Italian), perestroika
(Russian), salsa (Spanish), tikka (Punjabi).
2.3.1 Reference
The primary feature of meaning is the relation of reference between a lexeme
and the entity – person, object, feeling, action, idea, quality, etc. – in the real
world that the lexeme denotes. The exact nature of the reference relation has
exercised the minds of linguists and philosophers over many centuries (Lyons
1977). We use words to talk about and make reference to the world we live in,
our experience of that world, our speculation about what might have been or
could be, our imagination of other possible worlds and possible scenarios. Our
worlds are inhabited by humans and other creatures, by natural objects and
artefacts, by our ideas, opinions and beliefs, which possess characteristics that we
describe, and which interact in a myriad ways. We can talk about all these things
and communicate about them with other people who speak the same language,
because we have a shared vocabulary and grammar. In particular, we agree
about which word refers to which aspect of reality or our experience of it.
The reference of some words is both more obvious and more easily de-
scribed. This is the case especially for tangible objects (bicycle, trumpet) and for
physical actions ( jump, spill). For words that denote more abstract entities, the
16 Facts about words
reference relation is less clearly discernible. This is the case for many abstract
nouns (deference, solitude), for verbs expressing mental and emotional states and
processes (think, worry), and for adjectives generally, especially where they are
gradable (long, warm) or evaluative (ridiculous, superb). For some words, belong-
ing to the smaller, grammatical classes (1.5), a relation of reference may be
scarcely discernible (about, this).
What we are often interested in, including lexicographically, is how words
that have a similar reference differ from each other. For example, how do hap-
pen, occur, befall, transpire and, perhaps, materialise differ? They all denote ‘come
about’ or ‘take place’ (LDEL2: 718). The differences are subtle and may have
little to do with reference as such, and more to do with context: occur would be
found in a more formal context than happen; befall has an old-fashioned ring to
it; transpire and materialise are, perhaps, particular kinds of ‘come about’. We
cannot isolate a word either from the typical contexts in which it occurs or from
its relationships with other words.
2.3.2 Connotation
A distinction is often drawn between the ‘denotation’ of a word and its ‘conno-
tation’. While the denotation is the straightforward, neutral relation between a
word and its referent, the connotation brings in the, often emotive, associations
that a word may have for a speaker or a community of speakers. For many
English speakers, the word champagne, while denoting a sparkling wine from a
particular region of France, has the connotation of celebration or expensive
living.
Some words spread particular negative or positive connotations (semantic
prosodies) across the phrases or sentences in which they occur. For example,
fundamentalist or fundamentalism, which denote ‘adherent/adherence to the fun-
damental teachings of a movement or religion’, are usually used in a negative
context and with a connotation of a fanaticism that should be disapproved of.
On the other hand, inspire, denoting ‘creating the desire to do or feel some-
thing’, usually has a positive connotation and spreads a positive semantic prosody,
occurring typically with nouns like confidence, enthusiasm or loyalty.
Such connotations are widely shared and may be or become intrinsic to the
contexts in which the users of a language generally situate the words. Connota-
tions may be more restricted in scope, to a particular generation (e.g. blitz to
those who lived through World War II), or to a particular group (e.g. safe to
those who have hazardous occupations), or even to an individual. A connota-
tion that is shared by a large proportion of speakers can be considered as a
contributory feature to the meaning of a lexeme.
2.3.4 Collocation
The sense relations between words are ‘paradigmatic’ relations: a synonym,
antonym, hyponym or meronym would substitute for its counterpart in some
slot in the structure of sentences. The meaning of a word is also determined by
its ‘syntagmatic’ relations, specifically by its collocation, the other words that
typically accompany it in the structure of sentences and discourses. For exam-
ple, the noun ban is typically modified by the adjective total or complete, is asso-
ciated with the verbs impose and lift, and is followed by the preposition on. In a
sentence with the verb spend, the Object would typically consist of either an
amount of money (two hundred pounds) or a period of time (last weekend). The
adjective flippant typically associates either with a noun referring to something
said (remark, answer, comment) or with the noun attitude.
The word ‘typically’ occurs in all these statements about collocation, because
collocation is a matter of the statistical probability or likelihood that two words
will co-occur. One of a pair may exercise a stronger attraction than the other;
for example, wine is more likely to co-occur with red than red is with wine,
because red can co-occur with many nouns, while wine occurs with only a small
number of adjectives. Description of collocation is most reliably based on the
analysis of large computer corpora of texts, which can yield appropriate statisti-
cal data.
To summarise, the components of (the sense of ) a lexeme’s meaning are: its
relations with the ‘real world’ in the form of its denotation and connotation; its
relations with other (senses of ) lexemes in the vocabulary; its relations with the
other lexemes that typically accompany it in the structure of sentences.
3 The dictionary
How many times have you heard someone say, or have you said yourself, ‘I’ll
look it up in the dictionary’? The assumption behind such a comment is that
‘the dictionary’ is a single text, perhaps in different versions, rather like the
Bible. Every household is assumed to have one; children are taught how to
consult the dictionary in school; there is one in every office. Lawyers quote the
dictionary in court, teachers and lecturers appeal to it, politicians and preachers
argue from its definitions. The dictionary is part of the cultural fabric of our
society; each major new edition warrants a review in the daily press. And we all
take what the dictionary says as authoritative: if the dictionary says so, then it is
so. Life would be impossible if the dictionary was not the final arbiter in our
linguistic disputes.
Yet, walk into any bookshop and cast your eye over the shelf where the
dictionaries are, pick a few up and examine them, read the blurb on the dust
jacket, and you will soon notice that they are all different. They are all recognis-
ably dictionaries, with a more or less alphabetical list of words and information
about them, but they have different formats, highly variable numbers of pages,
a variety of page layouts, and so on. Compare some of the entries, and you soon
realise that the notion of ‘the dictionary’ as a single text is wide of the mark.
What distinguishes them is more notable than what they have in common.
Some headwords will be entered more than once. This applies to homonyms
(1.2), e.g. spell, with four entries in COD9, and to homographs, e.g. bow, with
one entry pronounced /bfg/ and two entries pronounced /bag/. In some dic-
tionaries (e.g. LDEL) each word class that a headword belongs to will occasion
a separate entry; for example, rear has four entries in LDEL2, one each for the
verb, noun, adjective and adverb uses of the headword.
The ‘micro-structure’ of a dictionary refers to the arrangement of the infor-
mation within the entries. The range and type of information within an entry
will vary according to the kind of headword, but will typically include some or
all of the following (compare 2.4):
• Spelling: the headword indicates the normal spelling, but any variations will
follow.
• Pronunciation: within rounded ( ) or slash // brackets, together with any
variations.
• Inflections: if these are formed irregularly or occasion some spelling adjust-
ment such as doubling of consonants, dropping of ‘e’ or changing ‘y’ to ‘i’.
• Word class: usually indicated by conventional abbreviations, ‘n’ for noun,
‘adj’ for adjective, etc.; verbs are also marked for ‘transitive’ (vt) or ‘intran-
sitive’ (vi).
• Senses: where a lexeme has more than one meaning, each sense is usually
numbered; where a sense, or group of senses belong to a different word
class or subclass, this is indicated before the sense(s) concerned.
• Definition: each sense is given a definition, which is an explanation of its
meaning.
• Examples: where the elucidation of a sense benefits from an illustrative
phrase or sentence, usually given in italic type.
• Usage: where a sense is restricted in its contexts of use, an appropriate label
precedes the sense concerned; if the restriction applies to all the senses of a
lexeme, the label precedes any of the senses.
The dictionary 27
• Run-ons: undefined derivatives (with a word class label), idioms, phrasal
verbs (if they are not included as headwords), usually in bold type.
• Etymology: conventionally in square brackets as the final item in the entry.
CED4 NODE
gl. GLA
glabella glabella
glabrescent glabrous
glabrous glacé
glacé glacé icing
glacial glacial
glacial acetic acid glacial period
glacialist glaciated
glacial period glaciation
glaciate glacier
glacier Glacier Bay National Park
glacier cream glaciology
glacier milk glacis
glacier table glad1
glaciology glad2
glacis gladden
glacis plate gladdon
glad glade
Gladbeck glad eye
gladden glad-hand
gladdon gladiator
glade gladiolus
glad eye glad rags
glad hand Gladstone
gladiate Gladstone bag
gladiator Glagolitic
gladiatorial
gladiolus
glad rags
gladsome
Gladstone
Gladstone bag
Glagolitic
4 The beginnings
This chapter and the next two trace the history of dictionary making in English
up to the present time. This chapter takes us up to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary
in the mid-eighteenth century, the next is devoted to the Oxford English Diction-
ary, and Chapter 6 first recaps on the American practice and then brings the
story up to date.
Besides having more entries than Cawdrey – it contained ‘sundry olde words
now growne out of use, and divers termes of art, proper to the learned’ –
Bullokar also provides more expansive explanations, e.g.
Heretike. He that maketh his owne choice, what points of religion he will
beleeve, and what he will not beleeve.
Hereditarie. That which commeth to one by inheritance.
Heriot. The best living beast which a Tenant hath at his death, which in
some Mannors is due to the lord of whom the land is holden.
Hermaphrodite. Of both natures: which is both man and woman.
Hermite. One dwelling solitarie in the wildernesse attending onely to
devotion.
By his death in 1641, the Expositor had reached its third edition with little
revision. A radical revision and expansion of the Expositor in 1663 by someone
who styled themself ‘A Lover of the Arts’ greatly increased its popularity and it
continued to be republished until 1731.
Part of the expansion of Bullokar’s English Expositor in 1663 involved extensive
borrowing from a third hard-word dictionary, which had been first published in
1623, Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie, and the first to use ‘dictionary’
in its title. On the title page of one of the first editions, though not subsequently
repeated, Cockeram acknowledged his debt to Cawdrey and Bullokar:
The ‘historical observations’ are included in the explanation and are sometimes
rather fanciful, e.g.
36 The beginnings
Hony-Moon, applyed to those marryed persons that love well at first, and
decline in affection afterwards; it is hony now, but it will change as the
moon.
Blount is also notable for giving his sources, or citing his authorities, an issue
that would become increasingly important. For example:
The ‘Bac.’ refers to Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the philosopher and scientist,
Blount’s source for this word. Blount is more comprehensive than any of his
predecessors, but the focus is still on the ‘hard’ words, with the addition of the
technical terms of ‘arts and sciences’.
Hard word dictionaries continued to expand: Edward Phillips’ The New World
of English Words of 1658 contained around 11,000 entries, which had increased
to 17,000 by the fifth edition in 1696, the year of Phillips’ death. Elisha Coles’
An English Dictionary of 1676 expanded his headword list to 25,000, largely by
adding dialect words, old words from Chaucer and Gower, and canting terms.
The canting terms were thieves’ slang words, and Coles justifies their inclusion
as follows:
Coles’ dictionary represented the state of the art in lexicography at the end of
the seventeenth century. However, it still did not contain the everyday vocabu-
lary of English. A truly comprehensive dictionary was still to come.
4.3 Completeness
The monolingual English dictionary had started life at the beginning of the
seventeenth century as a modest list of loanwords. As the century progressed the
word list expanded, mostly in the direction of the more unusual type of lexeme.
Etymology began to be attended to, and before the century ended two etymo-
logical dictionaries had appeared: Stephen Skinner’s Etymologicon Linguae
Anglicanae, published four years after the author’s death in 1671; and the anony-
mous Gazophylacium Anglicanum in 1689, which took much of its material from
Skinner.
The beginning of the eighteenth century brought a new focus to the mono-
lingual English dictionary, with the publication in 1702 of A New English Dic-
tionary, whose author is identified only by the initials ‘J.K.’ It is widely supposed
that the author is John Kersey, who revised Edward Phillips’ New World of
English Words in 1706 and who published a dictionary under his full name in
1708, the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum. J.K.’s dictionary proclaims itself to be:
The beginnings 37
A New English Dictionary: Or, a Compleat Collection Of the Most Proper
and Significant Words, Commonly used in the Language; With a Short and
Clear Exposition of Difficult Words and Terms of Art.
The whole digested into Alphabetical Order; and chiefly designed for
the benefit of Young Scholars, Tradesmen, Artificers, and the Female Sex,
who would learn to spell truely; being so fitted to every Capacity, that it
may be a continual help to all that want an Instructor.
Most of J.K.’s 28,000 headwords had never before appeared in a dictionary. Its
aim is to be ‘compleat’ and to identify the ‘proper’ words of the language; its
target audience includes the increasingly literate tradesmen and craftsmen; and
its primary purpose is to aid its users in correct spelling. Many of the current
school textbooks contained spelling lists; J.K. incorporates this feature into his
dictionary and thus brings into the dictionary the words of everyday vocabu-
lary. Many of the headwords in A New English Dictionary have only the scantiest
of definitions or explanations, e.g.
Little serious attention was paid to etymology; at best, the language from which
a loanword was borrowed is indicated.
The two principles, of completeness and etymology, came together in
Nathaniel Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721, which
promised both a larger scope and a wider group of users than its predecessors:
Bailey’s 40,000 words were culled from a wide variety of sources and encom-
pass both the everyday and the less usual. For the first time proverbs were
included (some ninety in all), and serious attention was paid to etymology, e.g.
The 48,000 items did not include the proverbs, though they were reinstated in
greater numbers in the second edition of 1736. The proper names, apart from
those from myths and legends, are removed to an appendix. Noteworthy here
is the inclusion of ‘Orthoepia’, i.e. pronunciation, as least as far as the stressing
(Accent) of polysyllabic words is concerned. Note, too, that Bailey acknowl-
edges the assistance of specialists in mathematics and botany. The second
edition, which increases the entries to 60,000, to better fulfil the title claim
of ‘universal’, also notes the contribution of ‘T. Lediard, Gent. Professor of
the Modern Languages in Lower Germany’ to the etymologies, to pay attention
to that part of the title. Lediard’s hand is evident, as the following examples
show:
The beginnings 39
Littoral (litoralis, of litus, L. the sea shore)
Little (litel, lytel or lytle, Sax. litet and liten, Su. lidet or lille, Dan. luttel, Du. lut,
L.G.)
(Note: the language label follows the form: L = Latin, Sax = Saxon, Su = Swed-
ish, Dan = Danish, Du = Dutch, L.G. = Low German.)
A number of ‘compleat’ dictionaries followed Bailey’s two during the first
half of the eighteenth century, but they were largely derivative of his, or indeed
reverted to earlier types.
But what I have most at heart, is that some Method should be thought on
for Ascertaining and Fixing our Language for ever, after such alterations are
made in it as shall be thought requisite. For I am of Opinion, that it is better
a Language should not be wholly perfect, than that it should be perpetually
changing; and we must give over at one Time or other, or at length infal-
libly change for the worse.
Just printed, Proposals for the Publication of a compleat and standard Dic-
tionary of the whole English Language, as it is written in all its various
Idioms and Proprieties, by the most authentick Orators and Poets, from
Chaucer to Shaftesbury, whose Authorities shall be quoted throughout:
According to the Method of the celebrated one of the French Academy. In
4 Vols. Fol.
There is, however, no evidence that the dictionary announced in this proposal
ever saw publication. Like Addison, the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was
interested in contributing to a dictionary; he drew up lists of the prose authors
from whose works he thought citations for a dictionary should be collected, and
on the question of ‘authority’ he comments:
The beginnings 41
In most doubts, whether a word is English or not, or whether such a par-
ticular use of it is proper, one has nothing but authority for it. Is it in Sir
William Temple, or Locke, or Tillotson? If it be, you may conclude that it
is right, or at least won’t be looked upon as wrong.
Such were the concerns of the eighteenth century about the state of English.
The dictionary would be an instrument in achieving the aims of ‘ascertaining’
and ‘fixing’ the language. Of these concerns, and of the expected role of the
dictionary, Samuel Johnson was aware as he planned his monumental work.
Before Johnson’s dictionary appeared, another work was published that pur-
ported to address many of these concerns: Benjamin Martin’s Lingua Britannica
Reformata of 1749. Its title page promises much:
In citing authorities, on which the credit of every part of this work must
depend, it will be proper to observe some obvious rules, such as of prefer-
ring writers of the first reputation to those of an inferior rank, of noting the
quotation with accuracy, and of selecting, when it can be conveniently
done, such sentences, as, besides their immediate use, may give pleasure or
instruction by conveying some elegance of language, or some precept of
prudence, or piety.
Additionally, Johnson intends to give the name of the author who first intro-
duced a word or phrase, or who last used an obsolete word or phrase:
By this method every word will have its history, and the reader will be
informed of the gradual changes of the language, and have before his eyes
the rise of some words, and the fall of others. But observations so minute
and accurate are to be desired rather than expected, and if use be carefully
supplied, curiosity must sometimes bear its disappointments.
Indeed, Johnson anticipates here the work that would lead to the Oxford English
Dictionary over a century later. In any case, Johnson’s restriction of his citations
to a particular range of ‘writers of the first reputation’ precludes his attainment
of this goal.
Johnson concludes his Plan with an address to the Earl of Chesterfield:
Whether Johnson believed his own rhetoric at this point, or whether he was
pandering to what he assumed were the Earl’s opinions, is uncertain. By the
time he had finished his dictionary, he was far less sanguine about its effects on
The beginnings 45
‘fixing’ the language, as he tells us in the Preface to the Dictionary (reproduced in
Wilson 1957):
Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require
that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which
time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposi-
tion. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while;
but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation that neither reason
nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain
time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that
promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the
lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a
nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability; shall
imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from
corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature,
and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.
If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acqui-
esce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It
remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we
cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot ultim-
ately be defeated: tongues like governments have a natural tendency to
degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some
struggles for our language. In the hope of giving longevity to that which its
own nature forbids to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of
years, to the honour of my country.
Let us look at that ‘labour of years’, which Johnson mentions. They extended
from June 1746, when he signed the contract with the booksellers, to April
1755, when the Dictionary was finally offered for sale. Johnson suffered many
vicissitudes, not least in his personal life, including the London earthquake of
1750, the long illness and eventual death of his wife Tetty in 1752, as well as his
financial problems, which required him to take on other work, among which
was starting The Rambler. At no time did he have the full complement of six
assistants working for him. And it seems that after a year or so of working on the
dictionary, Johnson decided that he needed to revise his method and start over
again (see Reddick 1990). His method consisted essentially in the following
procedure.
Using an interleaved version of Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum as his basis,
Johnson undertook an extensive supplementary reading programme. Having
selected a writer whom he admired, he would select a volume of his works, and
when he found some word that he thought correctly used, he underlined it in
pencil and marked the surrounding passage that he wanted copied. After he had
46 The beginnings
gone through the book and marked everything that he thought could be used,
he passed the book to one of his assistants, who copied out the marked passages
onto blank sheets of paper or in blank books. They were then cut, or ‘clipped’,
into separate slips and deposited in a bin. Subsequently, the large number of slips
were sorted alphabetically by headword; Johnson decided which were repetitious
or superfluous and so to be rejected, and which ones he would use. Sometimes
he would revise the quotations to fit his purpose. In total, 114,000 quotations
were used in the Dictionary. They were ready for Johnson to use by the summer
of 1749, and he had then to decide how many senses to recognise for each
word, write the definitions, and provide their etymologies. Pages were sent off
to the printer bit by bit, and then the printed sheets were returned to Johnson
for revision.
By April 1753, the first volume (A–K) was in final form, and a year later most
of the Dictionary was printed. It awaited Johnson’s prefatory essay on the history
of the language. It is also possible that Johnson was playing for time, awaiting
the award of an honorary MA degree from Oxford University, which was
eventually granted in February 1755. So the title page cites the author as ‘Samuel
Johnson, A.M.’. When it appeared in April 1755, the two-volume folio Diction-
ary sold for £4.10s (i.e. £4.50) and sold around 2,000 copies. Further editions
followed, on which Johnson worked, but it is the fourth edition of 1773 that
represents a major revision, incorporating all the corrections to the mistakes and
inconsistencies that Johnson was aware of from the first edition. Johnson’s
remained the foremost dictionary of the English language for a century, and
its author was acclaimed as the one who had done for English single-handedly
what it had taken forty French academicians to do for their language.
Johnson not only produced a monumental dictionary by a method, involving
the collection of evidence (citations) and using the evidence to construct the
entries, which became standard lexicographical procedure, but he also reflected,
in the Plan and the Preface in particular, on the nature of the dictionary compil-
er’s task and the issues that face lexicographers. Most of them represent ques-
tions that lexicographers have to struggle with still.
The first requirement of every lexicon is that it should contain every word
occurring in the literature of the language it professes to illustrate. In the
treatment of individual words the historical principle will be uniformly
adopted.
Herbert Coleridge was appointed as the first editor, and steps were taken to
recruit voluntary readers to peruse the works of English literature for suitable
citations. Coleridge drew up a set of working rules for editing the dictionary,
which were published in 1860 as the Canones Lexicographici. He died the follow-
ing year at the age of 31, from consumption, made worse by a chill resulting
from sitting in damp clothes at a long Philological Society meeting.
Coleridge was succeeded as editor by Frederick Furnivall, the third member
of the Unregistered Words Committee. Furnivall was a colourful and energetic
character, with great organisational abilities, but he had fingers in many pies. He
appointed sub-editors for the dictionary, whose job was to collect the slips from
readers and organise them before sending them on to the editor. Furnivall also
began to recognise how enormous the task was that the Philological Society had
set itself, and he issued a fresh call in 1862 for voluntary readers. He proposed
that a concise dictionary be prepared as a precursor to the main dictionary, but
it became apparent that it would require almost as much work, so it came to
nothing. Furnivall recognised that some of the earlier texts of English literature
were not available in published form; so he founded the Early English Text
Society in 1864, which concentrated on making available in printed form texts
from before 1558 that had not been published previously. They provided an
invaluable and necessary resource for the dictionary. In due course, Furnivall’s
other interests began to take over, and while he attempted to encourage his sub-
editors, their efforts and those of the readers slackened, so that in his annual
report to the Society of 1872, he notes that ‘the progress in the Dictionary has
been so slight that no fresh report in detail is needed’. Furnivall was looking for
a new editor to take over the project. After two abortive approaches, he con-
tacted a teacher at Mill Hill School in North London, who was a member of the
Council of the Philological Society: James Murray.
The New English Dictionary 49
The dictionary was in want not only of an editor, but also of a publisher.
Furnivall made it his aim to secure both. Negotiations with Macmillan, who
were known to be interested in publishing a dictionary, failed; but Furnivall
continued to cultivate Murray for the editorship, while having approaches made
to Cambridge and Oxford university presses. In due course, in 1878 Murray
was appointed editor and on 1 March 1879 the Philological Society and Oxford
University Press signed a contract to publish the dictionary. The contract agreed
a four-volume, 7000-page dictionary to be completed in ten years. The first
task was to retrieve all the materials that were still in the hands of the sub-editors
and readers. This was done, and Murray built a corrugated iron structure in the
garden of his Mill Hill home, which he called the ‘Scriptorium’, to house the
material.
While still a full-time teacher, Murray set about his task as editor. Sorting the
material that Furnivall had passed on to him, amounting to some 2 million slips,
Murray realised that not only were there still many gaps in the evidence needed
to compile the dictionary, but much of what he had received was not adequate.
So he initiated a fresh reading programme, calling for 1000 readers for a period
of three years: around 800 volunteered in the UK and between 400 and 500 in
North America. One of the most prolific and devoted was an American sur-
geon, Dr W.C. Minor, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was
incarcerated in the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, after he had
killed a man in London (his fascinating story is told in Winchester 1999). Murray
issued the readers with clear instructions on what to look for (quotations that
might indicate the birth of a word, or those that might define a word or were
unusual in some way), to be sent in on 6 inch by 4 inch slips of paper, with the
word in the top left-hand corner and full bibliographical details. He also offered
to refund the postage that a reader incurred in sending the slips in to him. When
he received the slips, Murray, with the help of his assistants, including his chil-
dren (he had eleven in all), sorted them and put them into their appropriate
pigeon holes in the Scriptorium. The three-year programme yielded around a
million slips, and some 5 million were eventually collected in all for the first
edition of the dictionary.
As well as collecting the essential data for the dictionary, Murray was also
working on the principles that would underlie the editing of the dictionary, the
appearance of the entries, and so on. In February 1884, the first part of the
dictionary appeared, covering the letters A to Ant. It was clear that if faster
progress was to be made on the dictionary – the ten-year goal was already
receding – then Murray would have to devote more of his time to the project,
and he would need help. In 1885, Murray became full-time editor and moved
to Oxford to be near the point of publication; a new Scriptorium was built in
the grounds of his house at 78 Banbury Road. A second editor was appointed,
Henry Bradley, as well as a number of assistants.
In 1888, the first volume of the dictionary was published, covering the letters
A and B. Murray explains in the Preface why it was taking so long to compile
the dictionary:
50 The New English Dictionary
The preparation of this volume has taken a much longer time than any of
the promoters of the work anticipated. The time has been consumed chiefly
in two directions: first, with the larger articles, as those on AT, BY, BUT,
BE, BEAR, BREAK, the construction of which has occupied many days,
sometimes even weeks. The mere study of the result, arranged in some
degree of order, gives little idea of the toil and difficulties encountered in
bringing into this condition what was at first a shapeless mass of many
thousand quotations. And in this part of the work there was practically no
assistance to be got from the labours of our predecessors; the attempt has
never been made before to exhibit such a combined logical and historical
view of the sense-development of English words. Our own attempts lay no
claim to perfection; but they represent the most that could be done in the
time and with the data at our command. The other direction in which
much time has been consumed is the elucidation of the meaning of obscure
terms, sometimes obsolete, sometimes current, belonging to matters of
history, customs, fashions, trade, or manufactures . . . The difficulty of
obtaining firsthand and authoritative information about these has often been
immense, and sometimes insurmountable.
The Preface acknowledges the help of numerous people, including the sub-
editors, who had given of their time voluntarily, as well as many scholars whom
Murray had occasion to consult. He also lists all the readers who had contrib-
uted more than a thousand quotations. And he concludes the Preface with this
comment:
After all the help which has been received, and which has contributed so
much to the completeness of the Dictionary, the element of time still re-
mains inexorable; it is still, as in the days of Dr. Johnson, imperative that
limits be set to research, in order that the work may ‘in time be ended,
though not completed’. Accordingly, since the close of Volume I, it has
been the aim of the Editor and his staff to maintain such a regular rate of
progress as will ensure the production of one Part a year. As Mr. Henry
Bradley (whose co-operation in the present volume is mentioned above) is
now at work independently, with a staff of assistants, on a third volume,
there is reasonable ground to expect that the production of the work hence-
forth will be twice as rapid as it has been hitherto.
Murray was perhaps being optimistic: it would be another 40 years before the
Dictionary was finally completed. A third editor, William Alexander Craigie,
was appointed in 1901, though he had been working in Bradley’s team since
1897; and a fourth editor, Charles Talbut Onions, was appointed in 1914, hav-
ing worked for the Dictionary since 1895.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914, the year in which Volume VIII was
published, hindered progress, as members of the Dictionary staff volunteered
for service in the armed forces. In 1915, James Murray, who had been knighted
in 1908, died at the age of 78. The previous year he had been treated for cancer
The New English Dictionary 51
Table 5.1 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles founded mainly on the mater-
ials collected by The Philological Society
and had recovered enough to work on the letter T, but he contracted pleurisy
soon afterwards and on 26 July went to his Maker, whom he had served for so
long in working for his beloved Dictionary. Henry Bradley did not see the
completion of the Dictionary either; he died in 1923, five years before the final
volume reached publication.
The completed New English Dictionary contained 15,487 pages, more than
twice the 7000 originally envisaged. James Murray edited nearly half of the
entire work, some 7207 pages. Out of the 5 million quotations amassed, 1,861,200
were used in the Dictionary. It contained 252,200 entries, with 414,800 defini-
tions. It had taken 44 years since the publication of A-Ant in 1884, and 70 years
since the Philological Society had first proposed a ‘New Dictionary of the Eng-
lish Language’.
In 1933 the Dictionary was republished under the title Oxford English Diction-
ary, in twelve volumes, together with an 866-page supplement, edited by Craigie
and Onions, the two surviving editors. The supplement included words and
senses that had been added to the language in the previous fifty years. Readers
had continued to send in quotation slips even for words in volumes of the
Dictionary already published. The supplement encompasses among other things:
words of modern origin that had been omitted, either intentionally or acciden-
tally, from the original dictionary; a large number of words from the arts and
sciences; an expansion of the colloquial and slang vocabulary; a more generous
inclusion of proper names; and American usages (Craigie was editing an histor-
ical dictionary of American English, which was published in 1936–44).
The OED aims to do what Johnson had aspired to over a century earlier: present
a history of the entire vocabulary, beginning with words that were in current
use in 1150, all supported by a series of quotations that would illustrate the
changes and developments in meaning, as well as the birth and death of words
and senses of words. Even so, the OED is not totally inclusive in its coverage.
While it took a descriptivist (record what is there) stance, there were Victorian
sensibilities to be observed, so some of what today would be labelled ‘coarse
slang’ vocabulary is missing, as well as some scientific and technical vocabulary,
some of which was only being coined as the dictionary was being compiled.
After all, when Murray went to see Dr Minor in Broadmoor for the first time in
November 1896, he travelled by train from Oxford to Crowthorne and then by
horse-drawn carriage from the station to the Asylum. The coverage may also be
affected by the reliance on volunteer readers and their varying ability to spot
what was needed in the material that they read. Murray’s instructions may not
have helped either, as he himself later acknowledged (Mugglestone 2000a:8):
Make a quotation for every word that strikes you as rare, obsolete, old-
fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way.
That said, the evidence from readers was frequently supplemented by the edi-
tors’ own researches, as well as by those of other scholars who were approached
for information, especially on rare or technical words.
Murray aimed to include all the ‘common words’ of the language, but, as he
makes clear in the ‘General Explanations’ that preface Volume I of the diction-
ary, this is a fluid category:
Murray acknowledges that the Dictionary extends its reach ‘farther in the do-
main of science and philosophy . . . than in that of slang or cant’, on the basis
that words in the former are likely to pass into literature, while those in the latter
remain in the spoken language only.
The OED divides words into three classes: ‘Main’ words, ‘Subordinate’ words,
and ‘Combinations’. Main words include all single words, either simple or
derived (1.6), as well as compounds which ‘from their meaning, history, or
importance, claim to be treated in separate articles’. Subordinate words are
‘variant and obsolete forms of Main Words, and such words of bad formation,
doubtful existence, or alleged use, as it is deemed proper, on any ground, to
record’; e.g.
Main and Subordinate words are headwords in the alphabetical series of the
dictionary, with Subordinate words printed in smaller type than Main words.
Combinations are those (derivatives and compounds) that either require no
definition or which can be ‘briefly explained in connexion with their cognates’;
they are dealt with under the Main word that constitutes their first element. If
a word belongs to more than one distinct word class, it is entered separately for
each class (e.g. brass as noun and as verb).
The entry for a Main word consists of four sections: the Identification, the
54 The New English Dictionary
Morphology, the Signification, and the Illustrative Quotations. The Identification
section begins with the spelling: the headword gives the usual current form, in
bold type and with initial capital letter. Any alternative current spellings follow,
e.g. Jowl, jole. Words that are thought to be obsolete are preceded by a dagger
symbol (†), e.g. †Kask (meaning ‘active’, ‘vigorous’). Some words are preceded
by a ‘||’ symbol, which relates to their ‘citizenship in the language’. In these
terms, words are classified as: ‘naturals’, ‘denizens’, ‘aliens’, or ‘casuals’. The
class of ‘naturals’ includes all ‘native’ words (with their origin in Anglo-Saxon)
and all ‘fully naturalised’ loanwords, which no longer betray their origin in
spelling, pronunciation or inflection (e.g. gas, street). The class of ‘denizens’
includes loanwords that are naturalised as far as their use in the language is
concerned, but which betray their origin in their spelling, pronunciation or
inflection (e.g. crèche, locus). The class of ‘aliens’ comprises loanwords for ob-
jects, titles, etc. which are in common use but for which there is no English
equivalent (e.g. intifada, Knesset). ‘Casuals’ are like aliens, except that they are
not in common use and may be found, for example, in travel books. Denizens,
aliens, and casuals tending towards aliens are marked with ‘||’, e.g. ||Hemiplegia,
||Kursaal.
Following the headword and any alternative spellings comes the pronuncia-
tion, in rounded brackets. ‘The pronunciation is the actual living form or forms
of a word, that is, the word itself, of which the current spelling is only a symbol-
ization’, writes Murray in the General Explanations. The OED predates the
International Phonetic Alphabet, and Murray took great pains, as well as schol-
arly advice, to develop an accurate transcription system to represent the sound
of words. Pronunciation is followed in the entries by ‘grammatical designation’,
i.e. word class or part of speech. Where a word belongs unequivocally to the
class of nouns it is not given a label, otherwise the label ‘sb.’ (i.e. ‘substantive’ –
an older word for ‘noun’). After the word class label, a ‘specification’ label may
be given, if a word belongs to a particular domain or subject area (e.g. Mus.
for ‘Music’). Another label that may occur, then, is a ‘status’ label, such as
Obs. (obsolete), arch. (archaic), colloq. (colloquial), dial. (dialect, i.e. ‘now only
dialect, whereas formerly in general use’ – as dialect words are normally not
included in the dictionary), and rare.
Where a word has changed its spelling or had previous alternative spellings,
earlier spellings are given, and if there are a number they are introduced by the
label ‘Forms’, e.g.
The numbers refer to the centuries, so ‘5’ = fifteenth century, ‘7–9’ = seven-
teenth to nineteenth centuries, and so on. ‘1’ is reserved for ‘Anglo-Saxon’,
pre-twelfth century. The final piece of information under Identification is
‘inflexions’, for nouns and verbs, where these are not formed regularly.
The ‘Morphology’ section of the entry charts the ‘form-history’ of the word,
The New English Dictionary 55
including its etymology (i.e. its language of origin), any subsequent changes of
form in English, and any other miscellaneous facts about its history. All this is
enclosed in ‘heavy square brackets’; e.g.
Knave [OE. cnafa = OHG. knabo, chnabe (MHG. and G. knabe):— OTeut.
*knabon-. The relation between this and the synonymous cnapa, KNAPE
(q.v.) is not clear. OHG. had also knappo (MHG. and G. knappe): on the
supposed relationship between this and knabo, see Streitberg Urgerm. Gram.
p. 151.]
(Note: OE = Old English, OHG = Old High German, MHG = Middle High
German, G = German, OTeut = Old Teutonic, Urgerm. Gram. = Urgermanische
Grammatik (i.e. ‘Proto-Germanic Grammar’), :— = ‘descended from’, * = ‘re-
constructed form’.)
Knave is a ‘native’ word, from Old English (Anglo-Saxon). Here is an exam-
ple of the Morphology of a borrowed word:
Hurcheon [a. ONF. herichon, OF. heriçun (12th c. in Littré), mod.F. hérisson
(in Hainault hirchon, hurchon, Picard hérichon, irechon) :— pop.L. *hBricion-
em, f. hBricius, late form of Bricius hedgehog. See also URCHIN.]
Each sense has its own definition, followed by the Quotations relevant to that
sense, arranged in chronological order. The first quotation records the earliest
discovered use of the word in that sense, and the last, if the word has become
obsolete, the last discovered use. The aim was to include approximately one
quotation for each century during which the sense of a word was known to
have been in the vocabulary of English. As an example, here are the quotations
for the first sense of behaviour (‘Manner of conducting oneself in the external
relations of life; demeanour, deportment, bearing, manners’):
1490 CAXTON Eneydos xxxi. 120 For hys honneste behauoure [he] be-
gan to be taken with his loue. 1530 BALE Thre Lawes 53 In clennes of lyfe
and in gentyll behauer. 1601 SHAKS. Twel.N. iii.iv.202 The behauiour of
the yong Gentleman, giues him out to be of good capacity, and breeding.
1754 CHATHAM Lett. Nephew v.32 Behaviour is of infinite advantage or
prejudice to a man. 1797 GODWIN Enquirer I.xiii.III Their behaviour is
forced and artificial. 1862 H.SPENCER First Princ. II.i. § 36 Special direc-
tions for behaviour in the nursery, at table, or on the exchange. 1875
JOWETT Plato (ed.2) IV.226 His courage is shown by his behaviour in
battle.
We have made bold forays into the written English of regions outside the
British Isles, particularly that of North America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, India, Pakistan. We have endeavoured to extract from text-
books and journals the central enduring vocabulary of all major academic
subjects, including newish disciplines like Sociology, Linguistics, Compu-
ter Science.
Burchfield also noted the inclusion of ‘a wide range of colloquial and coarse
expressions referring to sexual and excretory functions’.
The OED’s distinction between ‘main’ and ‘subordinate’ words is abandoned
in the supplement, though the system of labelling words as ‘archaic’, ‘obsolete’,
and so on is retained. However, the use of subject labels is considerably ex-
tended, in view of the expanding and specialised vocabulary of science, and in
view of the fact that ‘the complexity of many scientific subjects is such that it is
no longer possible to define all the terms in a manner that is comprehensible to
the educated layman’. The supplement volumes contained over 69,000 entries
in all, with more than half-a-million quotations.
As Burchfield’s work on the supplement drew towards its conclusion in the
early 1980s, Oxford University Press decided to take the next step in the devel-
opment of the OED. In 1984, the New Oxford English Dictionary Project was
founded, with the aim of transferring the dictionary to the electronic medium.
It was proposed to integrate the OED and Burchfield’s supplement into a single
electronic text, which would form the basis for future revision and extension of
the dictionary, as well as result in a second edition of the OED in print form.
Overseeing this development were Edmund Weiner, appointed editor in 1984,
and John Simpson, appointed co-editor in 1986.
The transfer of the dictionary and its supplement to electronic form was a
massive undertaking, which required the cooperation of several organisations
on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: the International Computaprint Corpora-
tion in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania; the University of Waterloo in Canada;
and IBM United Kingdom Ltd; as well as the Oxford University Press. The
project employed more than 120 keyboarders to input the text – the complexity
58 The New English Dictionary
and variety of the fonts and typefaces precluded the use of a scanning device
– and some 50 proofreaders checked their work. Edmund Weiner and John
Simpson, with a staff of lexicographers in Oxford corrected and edited the
electronic dictionary, and they added around 5,000 new words, to form the
second edition of the OED. One other major change was to abandon Murray’s
transcription system for pronunciation and to use the International Phonetic
Alphabet, which has become the standard system for dictionaries.
OED2 was published in a print version in March 1989, on schedule – the first
time that any part of the OED had appeared on time. It comprises 20 volumes,
runs to 21,730 pages, with 59 million words of text. It defines over half-a-
million words, and includes 2.4 million quotations. It takes up over a metre of
shelf space. A number of electronic versions of the first and second editions of
the dictionary followed, including a magnetic tape, for use on mainframe com-
puters, and a CD-ROM, for use on personal computers. A definitive single
CD-ROM of OED2 was released in 1992, with a second version in 1999.
Not only is the CD-ROM version of the OED more portable, it allows the
dictionary to be searched in ways that would be impossible with the print ver-
sion. For example, any of the following parts of entries may be searched inde-
pendently: headwords, definitions, etymologies, quotations. And the quotations
may be searched separately under ‘date’, ‘author’, ‘work’ and ‘text’. A search
under ‘etymologies’ can reveal all the words that have their origin in a particular
language, or more accurately, all those words that have the language men-
tioned, for one reason or another, in their etymology: the search for ‘Russ’ (i.e.
Russian) gives 473 results. A search under ‘date’ will give all the quotations
from works published in a particular year, under ‘author’ all the quotations
taken from that author’s works, under ‘work’ all the quotations from a particu-
lar publication. However, searching the OED in this way is not straightforward,
and it shows up many inconsistencies in the coding, arising no doubt from the
timescale over which it was compiled and the number of editors and sub-editors
who worked on it. If, for example, you wanted to find all the quotations from
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you would need to know that the title is usually abbrevi-
ated as Ham.; when you search for Ham, you find that you also have some
extraneous results, such as for the ‘B’ham Daily Post’. Nevertheless, electronic
searching opens up many more uses of the OED as a scholarly tool for research
on the English language and its history. Many inconsistencies and inaccuracies,
though, remain to be ironed out. And that is the purpose of the next phase of
the New OED Project.
There are a number of myths about the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the
most prevalent of which is that it includes every word, and every meaning
of every word, which has ever formed part of the English language. Such an
objective could never be fully achieved. The present revision gives the
editors the opportunity to add many terms which have been overlooked in
the past, but it should be fully understood that fully comprehensive cover-
age of all elements of the language is a chimera. That said, the content of the
Dictionary is certainly comprehensive within reasonable bounds.
It is often claimed that a ‘word’ is not a ‘word’ (or is not ‘English’) unless it is in
‘the dictionary’. This may be acceptable logic for the purposes of word games,
but not outside those limits. Proponents of this view expect dictionaries to
include ‘proper’ English, whereas dictionaries in fact include many slang, infor-
mal, technical, and other words which such people might not consider to be
60 The New English Dictionary
‘proper’, typically labelled according to the register of the language to which
they belong. It may be added here that the question ‘How many words are there
in the English language?’ cannot be answered by recourse to a dictionary.
The OED has come a long way since the Philological Society resolved to com-
mission a ‘New English Dictionary on Historical Principles’ in 1858. It contin-
ues to develop and be enhanced as an historical record of English vocabulary by
exploiting the new electronic media, and by incorporating the insights of recent
scholarship and research. The third edition promises to fulfil James Murray’s
dream to a level of accuracy and consistency that he was unable to achieve with
the resources at his disposal. But it continues as a legacy to his vision above all
others.
6 Up to the present
In our review of the development of the English dictionary we are now going
to backtrack a little and cross the Atlantic, to pick up the story as it unfolded in
America. The American colonies achieved their independence from Britain in
1776. As the new nation instituted its own system of government, investigated
its own flora and fauna, developed contacts, both friendly and hostile, with
speakers of native American languages, and absorbed large numbers of immi-
grants from Europe and elsewhere speaking a wide diversity of languages, the
vocabulary of English in America incorporated a whole new set of words un-
known to the speakers of English in Britain. At the same time, there were
trends, driven by the desire to assert the identity of the infant nation, to establish
an American language, as distinct from the English language. And there was
resistance to these trends.
In the event, the spelling reforms that were adopted in American English were
only a limited subset of those proposed by Webster: the ‘or’ spelling for ‘our’ in
words like favour; the ‘er’ for ‘re’ in words like theatre; and the single consonant,
where British English has a double, in words like traveller.
Another ‘engine’ that would further the sense of a national American lan-
guage would be a dictionary of American English. Webster’s first attempt was
A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1806. It was not
particularly original, being based, as Webster acknowledges, on John Entick’s
New Spelling Dictionary of the English Language, published in Britain in 1764 and
imported into America. However, Webster claims to have added 5000 new
words that he had collected from his reading and that reflected life in America.
He also added a 52-page appendix with a variety of ‘encyclopedic’ information,
such as foreign currency conversions, weights and measures, a list of local
post offices, and ‘Chronological Tables of Remarkable Events and Discoveries’.
In the introduction, Webster takes Johnson to task for his failings and claims
that he – Noah Webster – will be recognised as the most influential lexicogra-
pher of the time; moreover, what he would compile would be an American
dictionary.
The truly American dictionary, for which the Compendious Dictionary was just
a precursor, did not appear for another two decades. In 1828, Webster pub-
lished a two-volume work entitled An American Dictionary of the English Lan-
guage, containing some 70,000 entries. A small minority of these represented
words that were to be found exclusively in American English (e.g. bobsled,
gerrymander, moccasin, pretzel, squash, wigwam), and while he preferred citations
from American authors over British ones, they by and large illustrated a com-
mon language. The most admired feature of Webster’s dictionary has been his
definitions: ‘[he] wrote definitions that were more accurate, more comprehen-
sive, and not less carefully divided and ordered than any previously done in
English lexicography’ (Friend 1967, quoted in Morton 1994: 43). James Murray,
Up to the present 63
the editor of the OED, called him ‘a born definer of words’. The weak point of
the American Dictionary was its etymologies. Webster ignored the new philologi-
cal research coming from Germany and pursued his own idiosyncratic path,
based on his reading of the Bible, by which he thought all post-Flood languages
could be traced back to an original Chaldee. The etymologies would eventually
be revised, after Webster’s death, in an edition edited by C.A.F. Mahn, a Ger-
man scholar, and published in 1864 as the ‘Webster–Mahn’ dictionary.
The book has been entirely remade: the previous material has been sifted
and rearranged; a radical change in the construction of the page has been
introduced; the definitions have been treated with nicer discrimination and
a more historic method; and in every department there has been an en-
largement of the vocabulary and an enrichment with new information. Its
salient features in comparison with its predecessor are: A more full and
scholarly treatment of the whole field of the English language; a great addi-
tion of words and definitions; a greatly increased amount of encyclopedic
information; a more exhausting and discriminating treatment of synonyms;
a greater comprehensiveness in the illustrations; and an arrangement of
material that makes the dictionary much easier of consultation. In short, the
New International is essentially a new book.
The dictionary claimed over 400,000 ‘words printed in bold-faced type, to-
gether with the inflected forms that appear in small capitals’.
The numbers game continued to be played. Funk and Wagnalls claimed
450,000 entries in their New Standard Dictionary of 1913. Webster’s Second New
International Dictionary of 1934 claimed 600,000, though it is no longer clear
exactly what is being counted, certainly not just headwords (see 3.4). This
second edition of the New International, edited by William Allan Neilson, achieved
a dominance among American dictionaries, and ‘still figures in the minds of
many middle-aged and elderly Americans as the dictionary par excellence’ (Landau
1989: 64). But preparations were already being made for a third edition.
The primary objective of precise, sharp defining has been met through
development of a new dictionary style based upon completely analytical
one-phrase definitions throughout the book . . . Defining by synonym is
carefully avoided.
a solo dancer of imperial Rome acting all the characters of a story (as of
tragic love) usu. from myth or history by means of steps, postures, and
gestures alone with the help of changes of mask and costume, a chorus sing-
ing the narrative usu. in Greek, an orchestra, and sometimes an assistant.
It was in the overall policy that the Merriam–Webster traditions were honoured:
It was this policy – to state meanings in which words are in fact used – that was
seen by critics of the dictionary as innovative and, moreover, damaging. If
people could no longer look to their Webster’s dictionary for an authoritative
pronouncement on what the meaning ought to be, how words ought to be
pronounced, spelled and used, then they were adrift in a linguistic sea without
any chart or compass.
66 Up to the present
The American public has generally looked to their dictionaries as uncontestable
and reliable authorities in matters of language usage, more so than the British
public. W3 was widely considered to have abrogated its cultural role by suc-
cumbing to the influence of modern structural linguistics and its ‘descriptivist’
stance. Here is a typical reaction, from a review in the Chicago Daily News,
October 1961 (reproduced in Sledd and Ebbitt, 1962: 81):
In this new edition, it turns out that good English ain’t what we thought it
was at all – good English, man, is whatever is popular. This is a nifty speak-
as-you-go dictionary. Not like that moldy fig of a Second Edition, which
tried to separate ‘standard English’ from slang, bastardized formations, col-
loquialisms, and all the passing fads and fancies of spoken English.
What’s the point in any writer’s trying to compose clear and graceful
prose, to avoid solecisms, to maintain a sense of decorum and continuity in
that magnificent instrument, the English language, if that peerless author-
ity, Webster’s Unabridged, surrenders abjectly to the permissive school of
speech?
Contr. for are not and am not; also used for is not. Colloq. or illiterate.
The entry in the third edition is more extensive, and the comments on its usage
are more differentiated:
1 a: are not <you ~ going> <they ~ here> <things ~ what they used to be>
b: is not <it ~ raining> <he’s here, ~ he> c: am not <I ~ ready> — though
disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used
orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers esp. in the
phrase ain’t I 2 substandard a: have not <I ~ seen him> <you ~ told us> b:
has not <he ~ got the time> <~ the doctor come yet>
Even though the comment on the am/is/are not contraction implied a ‘collo-
quial’ restriction, and the has/have not contraction was labelled ‘substandard’,
the critics missed the condemnation contained in ‘illiterate’.
Not all reaction to Webster’s Third was hostile, and the dictionary continues
in print, with successive impressions augmented by an ‘Addenda Section’ of
new words and phrases. A fourth edition is said to be in preparation (Béjoint
2000: 45).
Up to the present 67
6.4 Collegiate dictionaries
Although American dictionaries range in size from the ‘unabridged’ dictionaries
like W3 to ‘pocket’ dictionaries, there is most competition in the ‘college’
dictionary market. The college, or ‘collegiate’, dictionary is a desk size diction-
ary, aimed at the lucrative upper secondary (‘high’) school and undergraduate
(‘college’) sector, as well as the learner of English as a second language (Hartmann
and James 1998). All the main publishers have a dictionary of this type, including:
a cake, long in shape but short in duration, with cream filling and chocolate
or other icing.
Since the first edition of LDOCE in 1978 to rival the OALD, then in its third,
but not significantly different, edition, the developments in learners’ diction-
aries have been remarkable, as each has sought to gain the edge in providing a
dictionary that will both meet the particular needs of this user group and make
the information as readily accessible as possible.
Learners’ dictionaries are discussed in some detail in Chapter 11. Let us just
note here that they have not been limited to the A-to-Z format of the four listed
above. Tom McArthur’s Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (1981)
arranges the vocabulary it covers by topic (lexical field), so that the learner
can both perceive the words available for an area of meaning and learn the dif-
ferences in meaning between them. In 1993, the Longman Language Activator
announced itself as ‘the world’s first production dictionary’. Intended as a sup-
plement to the traditional learner’s dictionary, the Activator aims to help learners
choose the appropriate word for a given context by arranging the vocabulary
under around one thousand ‘key words’. Both these dictionaries are further
discussed in the context of Chapter 12.
• search for a word, by typing it in the first box: fabric will find all the (317)
entries that contain this word, including those whose definitions indicate
that the word denotes a type of fabric; russ will find all the (123) words that
are marked as being of Russian origin (though you need to know that Russ
is used in the etymologies as the abbreviation of Russian).
• search for a phrase, by typing it in the first box: time of year will find the nine
items (six of them including season) that contain this phrase in their defini-
tions; musical instrument finds 81 items, some of which are types of musical
instrument.
• search for two or three words to occur simultaneously in an entry, though
not necessarily as a phrase, by using the operator and to join them: ‘flower
and petal’ finds seven items; ‘greek and roman and art*’ finds classical, classicism
and muse.
• search for two alternative forms: ‘complementary or complimentary’ finds 36
entries containing these words, all but four with the first of them.
• search for one (or two) forms but excluding a second (or third): ‘colour not
pigment’ finds 444 entries, ‘pigment not colour’ finds 71 (and, incidentally,
‘colour and pigment’ finds 19).
The Full text searches in the electronic COD10 are powerful and certainly
beyond what could be achieved using the print version of the dictionary. But
they are quite undiscriminating, finding a search item anywhere in the diction-
ary text.
The electronic COD9, by contrast, allows for more discriminating full-text
searching. It achieves this by allowing the user to switch on one or more of a
number of ‘filters’, which restrict the search to: headwords, definitions, idioms,
phrasal verbs, etymology. By switching on the ‘etymology’ filter, for example,
and selecting Russian as the search term, it will find this term only in the etymol-
ogy field of an entry. By switching on the ‘phrasal verbs’ filter and asking it to
search for ‘* & up’, it will find all the phrasal verbs that are formed with up as
their adverb particle. The ‘idioms’ filter enables you to search for all the idioms
containing a particular word, e.g. time. Selecting the ‘headwords’ filter also
allows the search to be restricted by word class, by means of a ‘part-of-speech’
filter. Switching on the ‘headwords’ filter, selecting ‘adjective’ from the ‘part-
of-speech’ filter, and then searching for ‘*able/*ible’ finds all the adjective head-
words and run-on derivatives ending in this suffix. The ‘definitions’ filter covers
everything else, including any restrictive labelling (Chapter 9): so, to find all the
words labelled ‘derogatory’ in COD9, you switch on the ‘definitions’ filter and
72 Up to the present
search for derog (once you have discovered that this is the abbreviation used by
COD9).
For lexical research purposes, the electronic COD9 is a more flexible and
sophisticated tool than its later counterpart. Moreover, the COD9 CD-ROM
contains all the front and back matter of the print dictionary, including the
preface, the guide to using the dictionary, and the very useful ‘style guide’. It
also provides a ‘standard British pronunciation’ of every word, which is activ-
ated by double-clicking on the phonetic transcription.
Using the search facilities opened up by the medium is not the only way in
which publishers have sought to exploit CD-ROM based dictionaries. The
CD-ROM version of NODE, for example, has the more limited search facili-
ties of COD10, but it is intended to match with other Oxford reference titles to
form a seamless integrated electronic library. The Oxford Talking Dictionary,
developed by The Learning Company, takes the text of The New Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary (1993), ‘a historical dictionary of modern English’ (Preface,
p. vii), including its quotations, and adds a number of other features: pronuncia-
tion, a proper name dictionary, a thesaurus, maps and pictures – to produce a
searchable encyclopedic dictionary and thesaurus.
These are the beginnings of the exploitation of the electronic medium for
dictionary purposes, but, apart from searching of various degrees of sophistica-
tion and integration with other reference works, publishers have done little
more than transfer the print dictionary to the electronic medium (Pruvost 2000).
There are more imaginative possibilities, and some of the CD-ROM versions
of the learner’s dictionaries have begun to take them, as we shall see when we
discuss them in Chapter 11.
In Chapter 3, we noted the important place that ‘the dictionary’ holds in our
culture. The education system makes extensive use of them. They are objects of
discussion and review in the media. We are a ‘dictionarate’ society (Ilson 2001).
Most people own one, have some idea about what it contains, consult it from
time to time. In this chapter, we are going to consider who uses a dictionary and
for which purposes. We look first at how dictionaries conceive of their aims,
then at the uses people make of dictionaries and how the structure of diction-
aries aids or hinders access to the information that users seek. Finally, we ask
whether dictionaries have two sets of conflicting and incompatible aims.
Gove identifies the groups of users whose needs have especially been consid-
ered in the course of compiling the dictionary, and he specifies what those
needs are: interpreting today’s culture and civilisation, understanding the
Users and uses 75
vocabulary of today’s society. ‘Interpreting’ and ‘understanding’ (hard words)
were the aims of Robert Cawdrey’s first monolingual dictionary in 1604 (see
Chapter 4). But W3 has an aim that Cawdrey did not have, and it in large part
explains the difference between them: to be the ‘record’ of the language. What
it is exactly that dictionaries are recording has been touched on briefly in Chap-
ter 3, and it will be examined in more detail in Chapters 8 to 10.
All dictionaries make a selection from the one to two million words of cur-
rent English. Gove acknowledges this in respect of the 450,000 words chosen
for W3. So, when a dictionary claims to provide ‘the most comprehensive
coverage of current English’ (NODE), or to be ‘the world’s most comprehen-
sive dictionary’ (CED4), we must interpret those statements as meaning ‘of
large content or scope; wide-ranging’ rather than ‘including or dealing with all
or nearly all elements or aspects of something’ (definitions from NODE). All
dictionaries aim for comprehensiveness in the ‘wide-ranging’ sense, for, as Samuel
Johnson noted in his Plan, ‘it is rather to be wished that many readers should
find more than they expect, than that one should miss what he might hope to
find’. NODE claims to have ‘targeted previously neglected fields as diverse as
computing, complementary medicine, antique collecting, and winter sports’
and to have undertaken ‘a detailed and comprehensive survey of plants and
animals throughout the world, resulting in the inclusion of hundreds of entries
not in any other one-volume dictionary’ (Preface). CED4’s claim to compre-
hensiveness rests on its coverage of ‘the whole spectrum of general language
from formal and archaic to slang and informal expressions’, its inclusion of ‘the
language of an enormous range of general subjects, from art to television, and
specialist subjects, from aeronautics to zoology’, as well as ‘varieties of English
from all over Britain and around the world’ (Foreword). Comprehensiveness
ranges, then, along the dimensions of formality, topic, and dialect.
Chambers, which also claims to have ‘enjoyed long acceptance as the most
comprehensive single-volume dictionary of the English language’ (dust jacket),
notes that dictionaries ‘must be faithful recorders of the language’ (Preface). In
fulfilling this obligation, they need to reflect changes in society and their effects
on the vocabulary, and this, in turn influences the selection of the words to
include. However, Chambers is mindful that, as well as being ‘of unrivalled value
to . . . students, scholars, writers, journalists, librarians and publishers’ and ‘re-
plete with words of technical importance to scientists, lawyers, accountants and
people in business’, it is also ‘the treasure chest for all word-game players and
word lovers’ (dust jacket). For this reason, Chambers includes ‘unusual and
archaic words’ for such users. Chambers also numbers among its users those who
‘read it simply for pleasure’ (Preface). The dictionary has an extensive range of
users and their needs to satisfy.
And they, like all dictionary users, need to be able to find their way around
the dictionary and access efficiently the information that they are seeking.
Dictionaries aim to be ‘accessible’. NODE claims ‘maximum accessibility –
with a revolutionary new entry style’ (dust jacket). CED4 claims that ‘in 1979
Collins English Dictionary revolutionised the way English dictionaries were
76 Users and uses
presented . . . by the simple but, at that time, radical approach of considering
the user’s needs’ (Foreword). Chambers claims to be ‘the most accessible of
reference books’ (dust jacket). Accessibility is about how a user gets at the
particular piece of information about the word or phrase that they are consult-
ing the dictionary for. In a reference work of the scale and density of a desk size
or concise dictionary, this is clearly an important issue, since users are not
usually prepared to peruse a considerable amount of material in order to locate
the sought-for nugget of enlightenment. We discuss below the factors that con-
tribute to accessibility; here, we merely note that it is an aim of dictionaries
to be accessible.
We can conclude that dictionaries have two fundamental aims: coverage, and
accessibility. Coverage includes the aim to be ‘comprehensive’, representing an
up-to-date and wide-ranging selection of vocabulary, and the aim to be a ‘faith-
ful record’ of the lexical resources of the language. Both aims can be viewed as
user-oriented: ensuring that what a user wants to know is made available, and
enabling the user to get at it by the most straightforward means. But do we
know what users consult their dictionaries for?
The first of these may involve either looking up a word that is unknown and
whose meaning cannot be deduced from the context in which it has been met
(a ‘hard’ word), or checking the meaning of a word about which the user may
be confused (perhaps, for example, aggravate).
A questionnaire administered to French students of English on their use of
monolingual English dictionaries (including learners’ dictionaries) revealed that
looking up the meaning of words was also the top use for this group of users
(Béjoint 1981). Checking spelling came joint fourth with checking pronuncia-
tion. Reflecting their use of dictionaries for writing tasks, including translation
(see 6.5 below), the second and third most frequent occasions of lookup for
these students were: to check the syntactic patterns that a word could enter; and
Users and uses 77
to discover a synonym for a word. What Béjoint also discovered was that most
of the respondents had not read the front matter of their dictionary, in particular
the guide to using the dictionary, and so were unaware of the wealth of infor-
mation that the dictionary contained.
Despite a hundred or more studies of dictionary use, we are still far from
understanding either the range of uses for which dictionaries are consulted or
the strategies that are used to access dictionary information (Hartmann 2001).
Most of the studies have focused on students, and many of them on students
engaged in tasks associated with foreign language learning – translation, writing
in the foreign language, and so on. And most of them have used a questionnaire
as the study instrument, which does not necessarily produce an authentic pic-
ture of dictionary use, as expressed by Hatherall (1984: 184):
Are subjects saying here what they do, or what they think they do, or what
they think they ought to do, or indeed a mixture of all three?
People like you said they wanted answers to the following questions. Am I
spelling this word correctly? What does this word mean? Am I using the
word correctly? How do I pronounce this word? Where does the word
come from? We also established that you set great store by the ease with
which you can understand the information in the dictionary, the clarity
with which it is presented, and the speed with which you can navigate
through long entries. In addition, we asked 41 professors of English from
the UK, Australia, the United States, and Canada about the language prob-
lems their students faced. This survey revealed surprisingly similar findings
across the globe. All expressed concern that students increasingly have dif-
ficulties with basic language skills – especially spelling and grammar.
(p. xi)
78 Users and uses
On this basis, as well as that of personal experience and anecdote, we may
conclude that users consult dictionaries for more than just ‘meaning’ and ‘spell-
ing’, though for these primarily. Where a dictionary is consulted during word
games, it is usually to verify whether a word exists or is a legitimate formation.
We may consult a dictionary to determine the pronunciation of a, usually tech-
nical, word that we have met only in print. Students of language may need to
find out about word histories and origins, or about the range and contexts of
meaning that a word may have. Or, as Chambers suggests, people may peruse a
dictionary for pleasure, or for ‘edification’ (Hartmann 2001: 88). Occasions of
lookup, or reference needs, are diverse and various: how do dictionaries aid the
user to access the specific piece of information they are looking for?
7.3 Accessibility
Let us consider first what may be involved in the dictionary lookup process.
Scholfield (1999: 13–14), whose focus is on language learners consulting a dic-
tionary to find out about the meaning of a word, suggests that there are ‘five
main steps’:
The points at which accessibility becomes particularly relevant are steps 3 and 4,
which relate to the ‘macrostructure’ and the ‘microstructure’ of the dictionary
respectively.
A dictionary’s macrostructure refers to what constitutes an entry in a diction-
ary and how the entries are arranged. We assume that a dictionary page has two
(sometimes three) columns, and that entries follow each other in alphabetical
order. Compare the headword list (from pros) for the following two dictionaries
of similar size and published within three years of each other shown in Table
7.1.
In this brief headword list, Chambers has only one item that is not included in
LDEL (prosauropod), whereas LDEL has thirteen that are not in the Chambers
headword list. However, apart from the first two – the abbreviation pros. and
the prefix pros- – they are all contained in Chambers, though not as headwords.
The macrostructure of the two dictionaries differs most obviously in the deci-
sions about which items feature as headwords. Chambers nests all derivatives; so
prosaism and prosaist are both within the entry for prosaic, proscription is under
proscribe, prosecution under prosecute, and so on. Similarly, the noun, verb and
adjective uses of prose, which have separate headwords in LDEL, are all dealt
Users and uses 79
Table 7.1
pros.
pros-
prosaic prosaic
prosaism
prosaist
prosauropod
proscenium proscenium
proscenium arch
prosciutto prosciutto
proscribe proscribe
proscription
1
prose prose
2
prose
3
prose
prosector prosector
prosecute prosecute
prosecuting attorney
prosecution
prosecutor
proselyte proselyte
proselytism
proselytize
prosencephalon prosencephalon
with in the one entry in Chambers, as is the more usual practice. LDEL puts its
abbreviations, like pros. in the headword sequence; Chambers collects them to-
gether in an appendix. Such macrostructure decisions affect the accessibility of
headwords, and so the search in Scholfield’s Step 3. All the words beginning
with the combining form neur(o)-, for example, are under a single headword in
Chambers, but each has headword status in LDEL; arguably, it is easier to find a
word like neuroleptic in LDEL, by scanning down the headword list, than in
Chambers, which requires perusal of a continuous paragraph, even though the
lexemes themselves are in bold typeface.
A dictionary’s microstructure refers to the layout and organisation of the
individual entry. Compare the following entries for nest from Chambers and
COD10:
nest • n. 1 a structure or place made or chosen by a bird for laying eggs and
s
Although the exact typefaces are not reproduced, the entries are replicas in all
essential respects. Chambers represents an entry style that was reflected in the
COD up to the seventh edition (1982), while COD10 represents a double shift
from COD7, in the direction of a clearer microstructure and enhanced accessi-
bility. The major differences are the following:
• word classes marked by ‘•’ and a bold abbreviation (n, v) in COD10, com-
pared with an italic n, v.i. etc. in Chambers
• COD10 has no pronunciation transcription for ‘simple’ words like nest;
Chambers has a respelling system (see Chapter 9)
s
The aim is for the user to run their eye down the entry, reading only the ‘quick
definitions’, in order to locate more easily the specific sense being looked for.
There are, though, conventions of dictionary microstructure that a user must
become familiar with: what a headword is, normally a transcription of pronun-
ciation, irregular inflections, division of the entry into word classes if relevant,
identification of different senses, the wording of definitions, the placement of
derivatives, phrases and idioms, etymology usually in square brackets at the end.
Then, it is the rare dictionary that does not utilise a degree of abbreviation, at
least for the word classes, and usually for the ‘transitive’ (v.t.) and ‘intransitive’
(v.i.) uses of verbs, as well the languages referred to in the etymology (O.E. for
‘Old English’, Ger. for ‘German’, L. for ‘Latin’, Gmc for ‘Germanic’). In the
Preface to the first edition of COD (1911), the editors, F.W. and H.G. Fowler,
aimed to save space ‘by the severest economy of expression – amounting to the
adoption of telegraphese – that readers can be expected to put up with’. Ninety
years later, dictionary users can be expected to put up with far less abbreviation
than their forebears, and in some dictionaries (e.g., NODE) abbreviation is
deliberately kept to a minimum.
Even with improvements in the macro- and microstructure of dictionaries in
recent years, to make information more readily accessible, the user must expect
to develop reference skills in order to become an efficient user of dictionaries.
The evidence from studies of dictionary use is that few users read the front
matter of their dictionary, which explains how the dictionary is structured,
how users may locate various items of information, what the various labels and
abbreviations mean, and what special features the dictionary contains. In general
terms, users must develop skills in finding the appropriate headwords – the base
form of an inflected word, where a compound or derived word is entered,
82 Users and uses
under which headword to look for a phrase or idiom. Also, users must be
familiar with entry structure, the division into word classes, the principles of
sense division, the wording of definitions, the contribution of examples, and so
on. Many have argued for training in dictionary use to be given in schools and
universities, rather than leaving it to chance and native wit (Hartmann 2001: 92,
Béjoint 2000: 168). But is there perhaps a fault in the dictionaries themselves?
It also includes notes entitled ‘SPELLCHECK’ after words that are pronounced
the same (i.e. homophones), e.g. here and hear, as well as ‘usage’ notes for pairs
that are frequently confused, e.g. complement and compliment.
The dictionary in the electronic medium (see 6.7) offers the possibility of
allowing the user to choose which types of information about headwords will
be displayed on any lookup occasion. The OED2 on CD-ROM has built in a
number of options of this kind. The user can choose whether to have the
quotations displayed or not, and there are ‘switches’ to activate the display of
‘pronunciation’, ‘spellings’ (i.e. form history), and ‘etymology’. If all the options
are turned off, the display offers only the definitions and usage labels for the
numbered senses of a lexeme. The Oxford Talking Dictionary has a more limited
set of switches: the quotations can be excluded, and the thesaurus facility is
activated by a switch. Electronic dictionaries generally divide their display into
a headword list window and a dictionary entry window, and each can be scrolled
separately. The headword list window operates in part like a spelling dictionary,
except that derivatives, compounds and so on that are nested in dictionary
entries may not be included in the list. The electronic medium does, though,
open up possibilities for selective display of dictionary information that have not
yet been fully exploited.
7.5 Learners
There are two sets of users whose needs have been carefully considered and for
whom dictionaries have been specifically tailored: children, and learners. Chil-
dren’s dictionaries range from the large-format work with pictures and an im-
aginative use of colour, aimed at those just beginning to learn to read, to school
dictionaries that look like the adult version, except with a more selective head-
word list, the omission of some word senses and of information such as etymol-
ogy, and definitions written in a simpler language. We could examine more
closely the range of children’s dictionaries, but our focus here will be on dic-
tionaries aimed at learners of English as a foreign or second language. We discuss
these dictionaries in detail in Chapter 11; in the context of the present chapter,
we look just at the reference needs of this group.
A learner, or indeed a native speaker, may consult a dictionary when engaged
in one of two broad types of language task. On the one hand, a learner may be
84 Users and uses
engaged in the task of reading or listening, and they encounter a word or phrase
that makes no sense to them and whose meaning they cannot deduce from the
context: the dictionary is used as an aid to ‘decoding’ the item read or heard. On
the other hand, a learner may be engaged in the task of writing or preparing to
speak, and they do not necessarily need to find an unknown word, but rather to
discover how a known word may be used in the appropriate context: the dic-
tionary is used as an aid to ‘encoding’ acceptable sentences and texts. For a
native speaker, spelling is the main encoding purpose that they might consult a
dictionary for; whereas learners may need to find out about spelling, pronuncia-
tion, inflections, how a word fits into grammatical structure, what other words
can appropriately accompany it (its collocations), and whether there are any
social or cultural restrictions on its usage.
Dictionaries for learners, therefore, need to consider not only their decoding
needs, which are not vastly different from those of native speakers, but more
particularly their encoding needs. This means that learners’ dictionaries need to
contain more explicit, more comprehensive and more systematic information
about the syntactic and lexical operation of words than a dictionary for native
speakers. Arguably, this information should be contained in any dictionary that
purports to be an accurate and comprehensive lexical description (Hudson 1988),
but in practice it is precisely in these areas that in native speaker dictionaries the
information is scantiest and least systematic (see Chapter 9). Besides, as we
noted earlier, it is not just a matter of containing the information, it is also a
matter of presenting the information in such a way that it is readily accessible
and takes account of users’ prior knowledge and reference skills ( Jackson 1995).
The early learners’ dictionaries, such as H.E. Palmer’s A Grammar of English
Words (1938) or the precursor to the OALD, A.S. Hornby et al.’s Idiomatic and
Syntactic English Dictionary (1942), concentrated, as their titles suggest, on pro-
viding accurate and systematic information about the grammatical operation of
words. The subsequent history of learners’ dictionaries (Cowie 1999) shows the
development and elaboration of that purpose, not only in grammar but also in
phraseology and collocation, with an increasing attention more recently on
making the information more readily accessible and usable. This has been achieved
in a number of ways. For example, the early editions of OALD presented infor-
mation about the grammatical operation of verbs by means of a set of codes
based on a system of ‘verb patterns’ developed by Hornby. Each sense of a verb
was coded (e.g. ‘VP6, VP15, VP21’). The regular user of the dictionary would
learn which patterns were represented by the commonly occurring codes, and
could look the less familiar ones up in the guide to the dictionary in the front
matter. The coded information was usually supported by illustrative examples,
so that the user could see a typical context for the word in the given sense. It
became clear over time that, while language teachers may have made good use
of the grammatical codes, many student users of the dictionary did not make the
effort to learn the system and relied largely on the examples. In later editions of
OALD the coding system has been abandoned; the grammatical information is
presented in a more accessible form, e.g. by means of formulae such as ‘~sth (to
Users and uses 85
sb)’; and more attention is paid to ensuring that the examples provide a suitable
model.
As we shall see in Chapter 11, learners’ dictionaries have developed in more
varied ways than just in the presentation of grammatical information. Entry
structure has in some cases been substantially revised, information and advice on
usage is incorporated, various types of additional material is included. Much of
the innovation has been in response to the perceived needs of this particular user
group, so that the learner’s dictionary has in many respects moved away from
the conventions of the native speaker dictionary (Rundell 1998).
8 Meaning in dictionaries
hook, hookah, hook and eye, hooked, hooker1, hooker2, Hooke’s law,
hooknose, hook-tip, hook-up, hookworm, hookworm disease;
its, it’s, itself, itsy-bitsy, ITU, ITV, -ity, i-type semiconductor, IU, IU(C)D,
Iulus, -ium
The headword list in CED4 (personal and geographical names are excluded)
contains ‘simple’ words like hook and hookah, but it also contains a range of other
items:
Some of the items that CED4 includes in its headword list would feature as
nested or run-on items in other dictionaries, including derivatives and some
compounds. The practice varies, with, for example, some dictionaries listing
solid compounds as headwords, but not hyphenated or open compounds. CED4
itself includes some items within entries that are further defined. Under hook,
for example, it defines: by hook or (by) crook; get the hook; hook, line, and
sinker; off the hook; on the hook; sling one’s hook; hook it. These are various
kinds of phrase, including idioms (by hook or crook, sling one’s hook), trinomials
(hook, line, and sinker), and slang expressions (get the hook, hook it).
One item in the list is entered twice: hooker, with the same pronunciation,
and with the following main meanings:
hooker1 a commercial fishing boat using hooks and lines instead of nets
hooker2 a person or thing that hooks
At first glance, you would think that the meaning of hooker1 would be included
in the more general meaning of hooker2. Why then does hooker have two homo-
graphs (in fact, homonyms), which are entered as separate headwords, especially
as the meanings seem so close? The basic criterion that dictionaries use to iden-
tify homographs is etymology: if two or more different origins can be identified
for the same spelling, then the orthographic word is entered as many times as
there are different etymologies. In the case of hooker, the first homograph is
identified as a loanword from Dutch hoeker in the seventeenth century, and the
second is the derivation by means of the suffix -er from the verb hook, which has
its origin in the Old English hoc.
With hooker, the homographs have not too dissimilar meanings. The opposite
case can also be found. Consider the following meanings for the word table
(definitions from CED4):
The ‘lumpers’ like to lump meanings together and leave the user to
extract the nuance of meaning that corresponds to a particular context,
whereas the ‘splitters’ prefer to enumerate differences of meaning in
more detail; the distinction corresponds to that between summarizing
and analysing.
Here are the entries for the noun horse from NODE and from CED4: one of
these is a ‘splitting’ and the other a ‘lumping’ dictionary.
Meaning in dictionaries 89
s
horse noun 1 a solid-hoofed plant-eating domesticated mammal with
a flowing mane and tail, used for riding, racing, and to carry and pull loads.
• Equus caballus, family Equidae (the horse family), descended from the
wild Przewalski’s horse. The horse family also includes the asses and zebras.
n an adult male horse; a stallion or gelding. n a wild mammal of the horse
family. n [treated as sing. or pl.] cavalry: forty horse and sixty foot.
2 a frame or structure on which something is mounted or supported, espe-
cially a sawhorse.
ν Nautical a horizontal bar, rail, or rope in the rigging of a sailing ship for
supporting something. ν short for VAULTING HORSE
3 [mass noun] informal heroin.
4 informal a unit of horsepower: the huge 63-horse 701-cc engine.
5 Mining an obstruction in a vein.
(NODE)
NODE has five numbered senses, by comparison with CED4’s fourteen. The
first sense in NODE encompasses the first five senses in CED4; NODE’s sec-
ond sense encompasses senses six, seven and eleven in CED4; NODE’s 3 cor-
responds to CED4’s 9, NODE’s 4 to CED4’s 13, and NODE’s 5 to CED4’s 10.
CED4 has some senses not covered by NODE: 8, 12, 14. Some of CED4’s
senses are ‘subsenses’ (introduced by the symbol n) to the ‘core’ senses in NODE.
The arrangement of NODE suggests that it is essentially a ‘lumping’ dictionary,
whereas CED4 falls more obviously into the ‘splitting’ category. Most diction-
aries tend to be of the ‘splitting’ type, though different dictionaries do not
necessarily agree on where to make the splits between senses. Compare the
following entries for the noun length in COD9 and CCD4:
90 Meaning in dictionaries
length n. 1 measurement or extent from end to end; the greater of two or
the greatest of three dimensions of a body. 2 extent in, of, or with regard to,
time (a stay of some length; the length of a speech). 3 the distance a thing extends
(at arm’s length; ships a cable’s length apart). 4 the length of a swimming pool
as a measure of the distance swum. 5 the length of a horse, boat, etc., as a
measure of the lead in a race. 6 a long stretch or extent (a length of hair). 7 a
degree of thoroughness in action (went to great lengths; prepared to go to any
length). 8 a piece of material of a certain length (a length of cloth). 9 Prosody
the quantity of a vowel or syllable. 10 Cricket a the distance from the bats-
man at which the ball pitches (the bowler keeps a good length). b the proper
amount of this. 11 the extent of a garment in a vertical direction when
worn. 12 the full extent of one’s body.
(COD9)
Table 8.1 shows how the senses match in these two concise dictionaries.
COD9 has only half of its twelve meanings directly matched in CCD4, while
CCD4 has seven of its eleven senses matched in COD9; the disparity arises from
the fact that Sense 7 in COD9 is matched to two senses (7 and 8) in CCD4.
There is one sense that looks closely related but is not a direct match: Sense 6 in
COD9 and Sense 5 in CCD4. The two dictionaries have not carved up the
meaning of length in the same way, and there are senses in each that do not have
counterparts in the other (the gaps in Table 8.1).
Are there any criteria, or rules of thumb, that lexicographers use in deciding
what senses to recognise in analysing the meaning of a lexeme? Context, clearly,
plays a part, but context can be analysed more or less finely. For example, the
first four senses of the noun interest in CED4 are given the following definitions:
1 1 1 1
2 4 2
3 3 3 3
4 10 4 2
5 5
6 6
7 7, 8 7 7
8 8 7
9 9 9 9
10 10 4
11 11
12
LDEL2 encapsulates these meanings under one numbered sense with two parts:
Clearly, in the end, it comes down to the lexicographer exercising their in-
formed judgement in the face of the evidence that they have to work with.
There are, however, two factors that a lexicographer can take into account
when distinguishing the senses of words: grammar, and collocation (Clear 1996).
It is possible that the use of length ‘usually plural’ as against ‘often plural’ led the
CCD4 lexicographer to distinguish senses 7 and 8 (see above). The fact that
reply can be used intransitively, as against transitively with a clause as object,
distinguishes the first two senses in CED4:
Some senses have a specialised or restricted use, and are labelled as such, e.g. the
Gymnastics, Mining, Nautical, Chess and Informal uses of horse in the CED4
entry given earlier. Some senses enter into particular collocations; as indicated
by the words in brackets in these senses for isometric from CED4:
There are at least two possible ways of ordering . . . definitions. One way is
to give the most modern meaning first and the oldest last. The other is the
way selected for this dictionary, historical order. In this method the original
or oldest meaning of the word is given first and the most modern or up-to-
date last. Both methods are equally easy to use but historical order is per-
haps more logical since it shows at a glance the historical development of
the word, each entry providing a potted history of the word.
(p. vi)
As a general rule, where a headword has more than one sense, the first sense
given is the one most common in current usage. Where the editors con-
sider that a current sense is the ‘core meaning’ in that it illuminates the
meaning of other senses, the core meaning may be placed first. Subsequent
senses are arranged so as to give a coherent account of the meaning of a
headword . . . closely related senses are grouped together; technical senses
usually follow general senses; archaic and obsolete senses follow technical
senses; idioms and fixed phrases are usually placed last.
(p. xxi)
Meanings are ordered according to a system which aims both to show the
main historical development of the word and to give a coherent overview
of the relationship between its meanings. Meanings that are current through-
out the English-speaking world are shown first; they appear in the order in
which they are first recorded in English, except that closely related senses
may be grouped together regardless of strict historical order. They are fol-
lowed by words [sic – presumably for ‘meanings’] whose usage is restricted,
Meaning in dictionaries 93
such as those current only in informal use or in American English. Senses
which have become archaic or obsolete are shown last.
(p. xvi)
Compare the order of senses in the entries for the noun mate from CED4 and
LDEL2:
Mate entered the language during the Middle English period, with the general
‘companion’ meaning. The LDEL2 entry reflects the later (sixteenth-century)
addition of the ‘sexual partner’ meaning, though this comes first in CED4
because it is considered the more common and central meaning in modern
English.
8.3 Definitions
Once identified, each sense needs a definition. The definition is a characterisa-
tion of the meaning of the (sense of the) lexeme; it is not an exhaustive expla-
nation of the possible referents (Zgusta 1971: 252ff.). Like other linguistic
statements, definitions in monolingual dictionaries consist of ‘language turned
back on itself ’, using the same language to describe as is being described. Much
of the art of lexicography (compare the title of Landau 1989, 2001) consists in
finding apt wording for constructing telling definitions. A number of general
principles can be identified:
• a word should be defined in terms simpler than itself (Zgusta 1971: 257),
which is not always possible with the ‘simple’ words
• circularity of definition should be avoided, i.e. defining two or more lexemes
in terms of each other (Svensén 1993: 126)
94 Meaning in dictionaries
• a definition should be substitutable for the item being defined; so the head
of the definition phrase should belong to the same word class as the defined
lexeme (Zgusta 1971: 258; Svensén 1993: 127)
• different forms of definition are appropriate to different types of word (Zgusta
1971: 258).
The most common form of definition is the ‘endocentric phrase’ (Zgusta 1971:
258), the ‘completely analytical one-phrase definition’ (Preface to W3), which
consists of ‘stating the superordinate concept next to the definiendum (genus
proximum) together with at least one distinctive feature typical of the definiendum
(differentia specifica)’ (Svensén 1993: 122). A good example of such a definition is
that given for the first sense of horse in NODE, cited earlier:
The ‘definiendum’ (horse) is related to its ‘genus’ (mammal ), i.e. its ‘superordinate
concept’, and given a number of ‘differentiae’ (solid-hoofed, plant-eating, domest-
icated, with a flowing mane and tail, used for riding, etc.), which are ‘typical features’
serving to distinguish this mammal from other mammals.
The ‘genus + differentiae’ style of definition, as it is sometimes called, is used
for a great many words from most of the word classes, with ‘differentiae’ appro-
priate to whether the meaning is concrete or abstract, referring to a thing, event,
quality, and so on. Here are some further examples from a range of types of
word, taken from a number of dictionaries (the ‘genus’ is in each case in italics):
Interestingly, the parent, desk-size CED4 adds almost nothing to the definitions
of the Concise for these words.
A third style of definition specifies what is ‘typical’ of the referent. This style
is normally used in combination with one of the others, usually the analytical
style, and is introduced by the adverb typically. Here are some examples from
COD10:
day of rest a day set aside from normal activity, typically Sunday on reli-
gious grounds
gingham lightweight plain-woven cotton cloth, typically checked
measles an infectious viral disease causing fever and a red rash, typically
occurring in childhood
scramble move or make one’s way quickly and awkwardly, typically by
using one’s hands as well as one’s feet
ululate howl or wail, typically to express grief
The last example adds a typifying definition to a synonym one, while the others
add it to an analytical definition.
A fourth type of definition explains the ‘use’ to which a word or sense of
word is put, usually in the grammar of the language. This type is typically
employed for defining ‘grammatical’ or ‘function’ words (determiners, pro-
nouns, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliary verbs – see Chapter 1), especially
where these have no reference outside of language. Here are some examples
from COD10:
and (conjunction) used to connect words of the same part of speech, clauses,
or sentences
96 Meaning in dictionaries
do (auxiliary verb) used before a verb in questions and negative statements
ever (adverb) used for emphasis in questions expressing astonishment or
outrage
herself (pronoun) used as the object of a verb or preposition to refer to a
female person or animal previously mentioned as the subject of the clause
that (pronoun/determiner) used to identify a specific person or thing
observed or heard by the speaker
us (pronoun) used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself and one or
more others as the object of a verb or preposition
All these definitions are introduced by used, and they are mostly framed in terms
of how the word operates in the grammatical structure of the language. In the
case of the adverb ever, though, the ‘use’ relates to its function in discourse, i.e.
for emphasis.
Definitions aim to describe the reference relations (Chapter 2) of a lexeme,
specifically their denotations. They do not usually comment on the connotative
or associative meaning of a lexeme, though this may occasionally find mention,
as in the definitions of champagne and youth in NODE:
Serge is a hyponym of fabric, the ‘genus’ term in this definition, and it can be
related as a co-hyponym to other words that have fabric as their ‘genus’, such as
corduroy, lace, velvet, worsted and so on. What you cannot find out from a conven-
tional dictionary is the set of all the co-hyponyms of a particular superordinate
term (see Chapter 12). If a dictionary is consistent, though, co-hyponyms should
be related to the same genus term. But dictionaries are not noted for their
consistency in such matters. For example, NODE relates fork and spoon to the
genus term implement, but knife is related to instrument. NODE defines handwrit-
ten as ‘written with a pen, pencil, or other hand-held implement’, but pen and
pencil both have instrument as their genus term.
Meronymy, the ‘part-of ’ relation, is a less well recognised as well as a less
pervasive sense relation. It is, though, used in the definitions of some lexemes,
e.g. (from COD10):
8.5 Phraseology
The other major component of meaning that we identified in Chapter 2 was
collocation, the regular or particular company that a word keeps. We noted in
8.2 that collocation may offer a method for distinguishing the senses of a lexeme
(cf. Clear 1996). Collocation is, in the end, a matter of statistical frequency of
co-occurrence, and lexicologists have not yet collected full data on the
collocational behaviour of words. Where dictionaries note collocation, it is in
cases either of a known restriction to the range of a word or where a collocation
appears in a particular context. The possible collocates or the restrictions are
usually contained within brackets before the definition and introduced by ‘of ’
or ‘especially of’. Here are some examples from NODE:
Most of the lexemes for which collocates are indicated belong to the adjective
word class: the collocates specify the nouns or types of noun they typically
accompany. Some verbs (e.g. meander, teem) may have their typical Subject or
Object noun collocates specified. Collocation is the subject of considerable
research currently, especially following the development of extensive computer
corpora that promise to yield interesting and reliable data on this topic. Lexico-
graphers of learners’ dictionaries have begun to include some of this information
in their works, since it is an area of particular interest and difficulty for learners
of English as a second or foreign language (see Chapter 11).
Another area of interest to learners is that of idioms and other fixed expres-
sions, especially where the meaning of the expression cannot be deduced from
the meanings of its individual words. Some dictionaries, as we saw in 8.1, list
binomials, and perhaps trinomials, as headwords. COD9, for example, has some
100 Meaning in dictionaries
120 such items as headwords, e.g. bells and whistles, flotsam and jetsam, sweet and
sour, waifs and strays. More difficult to locate are idioms proper, which are nor-
mally entered under one of the ‘main’ words of the idiom. Many dictionaries
are not very explicit about the rules for finding an idiom, though the rule of
thumb is that it will be under the first ‘main’ word. For example, a storm in a
teacup will be under storm, shoot one’s mouth off will be under shoot, but take a bull
by the horns will be under bull, because take does not count as a ‘main’ word.
Sometimes the rules are more complicated; LDEL2, for example, follows an
older tradition:
An idiom is entered at the first noun it contains; hence on the ball appears
at ball and in spite of at spite. If it contains no noun, it is entered at the
first adjective; hence give as good as one gets is shown at good. If it
contains no adjective, it is entered under the first adverb; if no adverb,
under the first verb; if no verb, under the first word. In any case, cross-
references to the entry where the idiom appears are given at the entries for
other major words in it: hand . . . – see also take the LAW into one’s
own hands. The entry where the idiom appears is shown in SMALL
CAPITAL letters.
(p. xiv)
Not all dictionaries are as good about cross-referencing, and locating an idiom
can turn into something of a hunt at times, especially as they are usually nested
towards the end of an entry. Some of the more modern layouts do make the
hunt easier, e.g. in COD10, which has a separate paragraph marked ‘PHRASES’
where this is relevant in an entry. Under shoot, for example, the following
phrases are listed:
shoot the breeze (or the bull), shoot one’s cuffs, shoot oneself in the foot,
shoot a line, shoot one’s mouth off, the whole shooting match, shoot through.
Each phrase is then given a definition, and any appropriate restrictive label.
Summarising, the treatment of meaning in dictionaries goes beyond simply
the definition; it includes the distinction of homographs, the identification of
senses and their ordering, the contribution of the sense relations, the incorpora-
tion of collocational information, and the consideration of idioms and other
phrasal expressions.
9 Beyond definition
9.1 Spelling
As we have noted before, dictionaries cannot help but give information about
spelling, since as alphabetically organised word books they are founded on the
written form of words. Consulting the dictionary to check the spelling of words
we also found to be one of the major occasions of their use (Chapter 7). While
headwords, or nested derivatives, supply information about the usual spellings
of words, there is additional information, about variations in spelling, that dic-
tionaries also give. The variation can be of various kinds.
Some words simply have alternative spellings, where the choice of one rather
than the other is purely a matter of personal preference. Both spellings are
equally acceptable. Here are some examples (from COD9):
A surprisingly large number of words have alternative spellings, and from this
list we can observe some possible patterns: final -ie or -y, suffix -er or -or, z or s,
possible loss of e after dg or v plus suffix, loss of accent from vowels of words
borrowed from French, and so on.
Many British dictionaries take account of the differences between British and
American spelling. CED4, for example, enters the American spelling of words
like center and pediatrics at the appropriate place in the headword list, and then
102 Beyond definition
gives a cross-reference to the British spelling. For words like savior and theater,
which would occur close to the British spelling, the American alternative is
simply given under the British spelling. There are two further spelling variations
that are often seen as differences between British and American English: the
ae – e alternation in aesthetics – esthetics, and the s – z alternation in -ise/-ize (e.g.
marginalise/-ize). The -ise/-ize alternation is no longer regarded as a British/
American difference; British dictionaries merely note these as alternative spell-
ings. The ae – e alternation is not yet fully accepted in British spelling. In most
dictionaries, with the exception of Chambers, encyclopedia is entered as the main
spelling, with encyclopaedia as the alternative; similarly with medieval and media-
eval. However, archaeology is the main spelling (or sole spelling – Chambers,
LDEL); archeology is given as an alternative in CED4, and is marked as American
in NODE and other Oxford dictionaries. And in the case of aesthetics, paediatrics,
etc. the alternative is usually marked as American.
One other area where dictionaries pay attention to spelling is where altera-
tions occur as a consequence of adding an inflectional suffix, such as cry – cried,
big – bigger. We will consider this in 9.3, where we discuss dictionary informa-
tion about inflections.
9.2 Pronunciation
How a word is pronounced is one of its idiosyncractic facts; it is the phonologi-
cal counterpart of spelling (orthography), its shape in the medium of sound as
against its shape in the medium of writing. We would expect, therefore, that
dictionaries would indicate at least the sounds that constitute the pronunciation
of the word, and for words of more than one syllable the stress pattern. There
are two issues in relation to pronunciation in dictionaries: first, how pronuncia-
tion is represented in the written medium that the dictionary uses, i.e. the
transcription system; and second, the model that is used for pronunciation, and
how much variation is indicated.
In most modern British dictionaries, the transcription system used to repre-
sent pronunciation is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), developed
in the late nineteenth century as a system, based on the Roman alphabet, that
could be used for transcribing the speech of any language, and as an aid in
learning the pronunciation of a foreign language. The alternative transcription
to the IPA is a ‘respelling’ system. When James Murray was devising a transcrip-
tion system for the OED in the mid-nineteenth century, the IPA had not yet
been invented, and he developed a respelling system. However, when the sec-
ond edition of the OED was put together, the only wholesale revision was to
replace Murray’s respellings with IPA transcriptions. Other Oxford dictionaries
followed suit: COD7 (1982) had respelling, COD8 (1990) changed to the IPA.
LDEL uses respelling; so does ECED and Chambers, but Chambers 21st Century
Dictionary uses IPA, as do the Collins dictionaries. American dictionaries, how-
ever, usually use a respelling system.
Both transcription systems have the aim of a one-to-one correspondence
between sound and symbol, and unique representation of each sound. In the
Beyond definition 103
Table 9.1
case of the IPA, because it uses symbols additional to those in the Roman
alphabet, it mostly uses a single symbol to represent each sound. A respelling
system, restricting itself to the symbols of the Roman alphabet, perhaps with the
addition of the ‘schwa’ symbol/f/, needs to use digraphs and even trigraphs in
order to achieve a unique one-to-one correspondence. Table 9.1 shows some
examples of transcription from a variety of dictionaries.
The argument used in favour of respelling is that it uses mostly familiar sym-
bols (Paikeday 1993), whereas the IPA employs a considerable number of sym-
bols that are not contained in the Roman alphabet. On the other hand, a respelling
system either has to use diacritics, as in the Chambers version, or a large number
of digraphs, as in the LDEL system (e.g. oo, aw, uh). Arguably, any transcrip-
tion system will constitute a learning task for the user who needs to consult it,
or at least the ability to interpret the table where the transcription is described
and illustrated. Some dictionaries provide reminders of the symbols at the
bottom of each page, e.g. COD9, with vowels on one double-page and con-
sonants on the next. Some CD-ROM versions of dictionaries provide a
recorded pronunciation of each transcription contained in the dictionary
(e.g. COD9).
Pronunciation is not information that native speakers regularly consult a
dictionary for. If they do, it is likely to be in order to check the pronunciation
of a word that they have met only in writing. Perhaps in recognition of this,
NODE and subsequently COD10 do not give a transcription of the pronuncia-
tion of ‘ordinary, everyday words’, rather:
In the New Oxford Dictionary of English, the principle followed is that pro-
nunciations are given where they are likely to cause problems for the native
speaker of English, in particular for foreign words, foreign names, scientific
and other specialist terms, rare words, words with unusual stress patterns,
and words where there are alternative pronunciations or where there is a
dispute about the standard pronunciation.
(Introduction, p. xvii)
• coastguard /skfgs(t)gp:d/
• distribute /disstribju:t/ - /sdistribju:t/
• February /sfvbrgfri/ - /sfvbjgfri/
• oceanic /fgnisanik/ - /fgsisanik/
• sedentary /ssvd(f)nt(f)ri/
• vin rosé /van rfgszei/ - /vṽroze/
9.3 Inflection
For most words that can be inflected in English – nouns, verbs, adjectives (see
Chapter 1) – the inflection follows from the general rules of morphology, is not
idiosyncratic to the individual lexeme, and is therefore not appropriate to the
lexical information contained in dictionaries. However, there are some excep-
tions to this generalisation, which dictionaries do record. A small number of
adjectives, some nouns, and a larger number of verbs inflect ‘irregularly’, not
according to the general pattern, and these are given for each lexeme con-
cerned, e.g.
These basic irregularities do not exhaust the possible idiosyncracies, and dic-
tionaries tend to give any inflection that is likely to cause a difficulty for writers,
including predictable spelling variations.
106 Beyond definition
For the plural inflection of nouns, the following may well be noted:
• loanwords that retain their original, ‘foreign’ plural, e.g. cactus – cacti, crite-
rion – criteria, kibbutz – kibbutzim, phylum – phyla, vertex – vertices. More and
more of these plurals are becoming regularised, including cactuses and
vertexes.
• nouns that end in -o or -i, where there is often confusion about whether the
inflection is -s or -es, e.g. curio-s, domino-es, etui-s, halo-es or -s, piccallili-es or
-s.
• nouns ending in -y, which may change the y to i and add -es, or may simply
add -s, e.g. abbey-s, academy – academies, monkey -s, mystery – mysteries,
odyssey-s, symmetry – symmetries.
• nouns that change either the spelling or pronunciation of their final sound
(voicing of /m/, /f/ or /s/) when the plural suffix is added, e.g. bath-s, hoof
– hooves, house-s, mouth-s, shelf – shelves, truth-s, wolf – wolves.
• where the final consonant of the root is doubled in spelling with the addi-
tion of a suffix: flip – flipping – flipped, lag – lagging – lagged, prod – prodding –
prodded, refer – referring – referred, shovel – shovelling – shovelled, sin – sinning –
sinned.
• where the final consonant might be expected to double, but does not, e.g.
benefit – benefiting – benefited, galop – galoping – galoped, gossip – gossiping –
gossiped, market – marketing – marketed, pilgrim – pilgriming – pilgrimed.
• where the final consonant is -c and a k is added before the inflectional suffix,
e.g. bivouac – bivouacking – bivouacked, magic – magicking – magicked, picnic –
picnicking – picnicked.
• where the final consonant is -y, which may change to i before an inflec-
tional suffix, e.g. cry – cries – cried (but crying), shy – shies – shied, supply –
supplies – supplied, weary – wearies – wearied.
• the consonant doubling rule, as for verbs, e.g. big – bigger – biggest, hip –
hipper – hippest, sad – sadder – saddest.
• the y to i rule, as for verbs, e.g. dry – drier – driest, fluffy – fluffier – fluffiest,
lively – livelier – liveliest, rosy – rosier – rosiest, wacky – wackier – wackiest
(but not sly -er, -est).
argue 1 (intr) to quarrel; wrangle: they were always arguing until I arrived. 2
(intr; often foll. by for or against) to present supporting or opposing reasons
or cases in a dispute; reason. 3 (tr; may take a clause as object) to try to prove
by presenting reasons; maintain. 4 (tr; often passive) to debate or discuss: the
case was fully argued before agreement was reached. 5 (tr) to persuade: he argued me
into going. 6 (tr) to give evidence of; suggest: her looks argue despair.
[CED4]
argue 1 (reporting verb) give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea,
action, or theory; typically with the aim of persuading others to share one’s
view: [with clause] sociologists argue that inequalities in industrial societies are
being reduced | [with direct speech] ‘It stands to reason,’ she argued.
• [with obj.] (argue someone into/out of ) persuade someone to do or
not to do (something) by giving reasons: I tried to argue him out of it.
2 [no obj.] exchange or express diverging or opposite views, typically in a
heated or angry way: don’t argue with me | figurative I wasn’t going to argue
with a gun | [with obj.] she was too tired to argue the point.
[NODE]
These two dictionaries give considerably more syntactic information for verbs,
both by way of labels and in examples, than has been customary in general-
purpose dictionaries, even of desk size, until recently. NODE justifies this ap-
proach both by pointing to the role of grammar in distinguishing the meanings
or senses of lexemes and with the following argument:
the aim is to present information in such a way that it helps to explain the
structure of the language itself, not just the meanings of the individual
senses. For this reason, special attention has been paid to the grammar of
each word, and grammatical structures are given explicitly.
(p. xi)
9.6 Usage
All dictionaries have a set of labels to mark words or senses of words that are
restricted in some way in the contexts in which they may occur. The contextual
restrictions may be geographical (i.e. dialectal), historical (e.g. archaic), stylistic
(e.g. informal), according to topic (e.g. Botany), and so on. In this section, we
review the types and range of usage labels used in general-purpose dictionaries.
110 Beyond definition
9.6.1 Dialect
Dialect labels refer to geographical restriction, and we can take this to include
both national varieties and regional dialects within a national variety. Most
British dictionaries nowadays claim an international perspective and include
words peculiar to the vocabulary of other English-speaking countries, but still
largely confined to North America, Australia and New Zealand, and South
Africa. The newer Englishes of, say, the Indian subcontinent, or West Africa, or
the Caribbean, or Singapore tend to receive lesser attention. However, COD10,
for example, contains around fifty words marked ‘W. Indian’, and a rather
larger number labelled ‘Indian’, e.g.
• West Indian braata, dotish, fingle, higgler, mamguy, nancy story, spraddle, tafia
• Indian babu, charpoy, durzi, haveli, lakh, nullah, sadhu, zamindar.
NODE claims around 14,000 geographical labels spread through the diction-
ary, but these are mainly ‘regionalisms encountered in standard contexts in the
different English-speaking areas of the world’ (p. xvi). The largest number,
inevitably, belong to the vocabularies of English spoken in North America, for
which NODE has three labels: ‘N. Amer.’ (i.e. North American), ‘US’ (i.e.
United States), and ‘Canadian’. The last two are presumably for cases where the
restriction is more limited, e.g. in the case of blue box:
A similar labelling is used for words specific to Australian and New Zealand
Englishes, where the majority are marked ‘Austral./NZ’ (e.g. mullock ‘rubbish,
nonsense’), because they are shared by both varieties, and some are marked
separately, rather more ‘Austral’ (e.g. gunyah ‘bush hut’) than ‘NZ’ (e.g. kumara,
‘sweet potato’). There is no such confusion about South African English words
(e.g. koppie ‘small hill’), though some are shared with other varieties, e.g. dingus
(shared with ‘N. Amer’) ‘a thing one cannot or does not wish to name specifi-
cally’, dropper (shared with ‘Austral./NZ’) ‘a light vertical stave in a fence’.
Words or senses that are exclusive to the British English variety are also appro-
priately marked (over 4,000 in NODE), e.g. fly-past, gobstopper, knacker, linctus,
nearside, peckish, scrapyard.
When it comes to dialects within Britain, NODE/COD10 are less specific.
While they have a label ‘Scottish’ and ‘N(orthern) English’ (often occurring
together for a word), all other dialect words are marked simply as ‘dialect’,
except that one word (scally) is noted as N(orth) W(est) English, and a handful
are labelled ‘black English’. LDEL and, more especially, CED have both a greater
Beyond definition 111
representation of British English dialect words and a more differentiated label-
ling. CED4 notes in its Guide:
Regional dialects (Scot. and northern English dialect, Midland dialect, etc.) have
been specified as precisely as possible, even at the risk of overrestriction, in
order to give the reader an indication of the appropriate regional flavour.
(CED4, p. xxi)
So, chine, in the sense of ‘a deep fissure in the wall of a cliff ’, is labelled ‘Southern
English dialect’; flash meaning ‘a pond, esp. as produced as a consequence of
subsidence’ is marked ‘Yorkshire and Lancashire dialect’; maungy ‘(esp. of a
child) sulky, bad-tempered or peevish’ is labelled ‘West Yorkshire dialect’; snicket
‘a passageway between walls or fences’ has the label ‘Northern English dialect’;
and tump ‘a small mound or clump’ is marked ‘Western English dialect’.
9.6.2 Formality
A number of words or senses are marked as ‘formal’ or ‘informal’, though the
latter label usually greatly outnumbers the former: in COD10, for example, the
‘informal’ label occurs over seven times more frequently than the ‘formal’ label.
These terms relate to the formality of the context in which a word is deemed to
be appropriate. They are defined in the LDEL2 Guide as follows:
9.6.3 Status
By ‘status’ we mean the propriety of the use of a word, even in ordinary conver-
sation. Under ‘status’ we would include the term ‘taboo’. A taboo is defined
in COD10 as ‘a social or religious custom placing prohibition or restriction
on a particular thing or person’, while COD9 also includes as a second sense
‘a prohibition or restriction imposed on certain behaviour, word usage, etc., by
social custom’. A taboo word, therefore, is one that you would not use in
ordinary conversation, unless you wanted to shock. Such taboo words would
include: those connected with sexual and excretory functions, blasphemies,
and other ‘swear’ words. However, there is little left in our society that is taboo,
and so modern dictionaries no longer use the label; CED4 is an exception.
Not even COD9, which mentions the connection with ‘word usage’ in its
definition of taboo uses it as a label, preferring ‘coarse slang’ instead. In NODE
and COD10, this has become ‘vulgar slang’; LDEL2 and Chambers use simply
‘vulgar’.
In the Oxford dictionaries, then, the connection is made with ‘slang’, the
other term under this heading, and glossed by CED4 as follows:
Slang This refers to words or senses that are racy or extremely informal.
The appropriate contexts in which slang is used are restricted, for example,
to members of a particular social group or those engaged in a particular
activity. Slang words are inappropriate informal speech or writing.
‘Slang’ is, therefore, not just ‘very informal’; it implies a restriction beyond
simply the formality of the context of use, to defined social groups, and it
includes a consideration of appropriacy. It belongs with ‘taboo’. Even more so
than with informal words, the slang status of words may change over a relatively
short period of time and quickly become dated. Not only that, but people’s
tolerance of slang varies considerably, and it is no surprise that dictionaries
differ in their labelling of such words. In fact, COD10 does not use the label
‘slang’ on its own, unlike COD9, but only in conjunction with a preceding
defining adjective, such as ‘nautical’, ‘military’, ‘theatrical’, ‘black’, as well as
‘vulgar’. A number of the words marked as ‘slang’ in COD9 have become
‘informal’ in COD10, e.g. acid (= LSD), aggro, awesome (= excellent), banger
(= sausage, old car), dough (= money). However, those that are marked ‘coarse
slang’ in COD9 generally have the label ‘vulgar slang’ in COD10, e.g. arse, crap,
piss, turd, not to mention the many words for the male and female genitalia.
Incidentally, though, fart is labelled ‘coarse slang’ in COD9, but only ‘informal’
in COD10.
Beyond definition 113
9.6.4 Effect
There is a set of usage labels used in dictionaries that relate to the effect that a
word or sense is intended by the speaker or writer to produce in the hearer or
reader. Any dictionary usually makes a selection from these labels. One set
reflects the attitude of the speaker and includes: ‘derogatory’ (intending to be
disrespectful), ‘pejorative’ (intending to show contempt), ‘appreciative’ (intending
to show a positive attitude), ‘humorous’ or ‘jocular’ (conveying a light-hearted
attitude). Closely related is the term ‘offensive’, which may have intent on the
part of the speaker or may be unconscious, but which could be taken by a hearer
as offensive, either racially or in some other way. Other kinds of ‘effect’ label
include: ‘euphemistic’, i.e. using an oblique word to refer to an unpleasant
topic; ‘literary’ and ‘poetic’, i.e. words that tend to be confined to literary texts
or poetry and have a ‘literary’ effect when they are used elsewhere. Here are
some examples:
Even more than with formality and status labels, we would expect effect labels
to vary between dictionaries, since they require a greater exercise of judgement
on the part of the lexicographer and are more likely to be variously perceived.
9.6.5 History
Most dictionaries include labels for words or senses that are either no longer in
current use or whose currency is questionable or suspect. The term ‘obsolete’
refers to words or senses that have definitely ceased to be used. It is, of course, an
important term in the OED, but in dictionaries that purport to contain current
vocabulary, it is not often used. LDEL2 includes it, however, with the gloss:
‘dated’: no longer used by the majority of English speakers, but still en-
countered, especially among the older generation.
‘archaic’: old-fashioned language, not in ordinary use today, though some-
times used to give a deliberately old-fashioned effect and also encountered
in the literature of the past.
‘historical’: still used today, but in reference to some practice or artefact that
is no longer part of the modern world.
‘rare’: not in normal use.
The ‘historical’ label marks not words as such but the things that they denote
as being no longer current. It is not clear how ‘rare’ might differ from ‘archaic’.
Perhaps some examples (from COD10) will help to distinguish them:
• dated aeronaut, cobble (= repair, e.g. shoes), gamp (= umbrella), jerry (= chamber
pot), necktie, picture palace (= cinema), spiffing, wireless (= radio)
• archaic asunder, chapman, fandangle, guidepost, mayhap, poltroon, therewithal,
vizard
• historical approved school, dolly tub, footpad, jongleur, margrave, pocket borough,
safety lamp, tumbril, velocipede
• rare argute (= shrewd), comminatory (= threatening, vengeful), lustrate (= purify,
e.g. by sacrifice), toxophilite (= archer), vaticinate (= foretell future).
• handshaking computing
• periventricular anatomy and medicine
• quiddity philosophy
• sopranino music
• top edge cricket
Beyond definition 115
• weather helm nautical
• white hole astronomy.
Nowhere are the battle lines more deeply drawn in usage questions than
over the difference between disinterested and uninterested. According
to traditional guidelines, disinterested should never be used to mean ‘not
interested’ (i.e. it is not a synonym for uninterested) but only to mean
‘impartial’, as in the judgements of disinterested outsiders are likely to be more
useful. Ironically, the earliest recorded sense of disinterested is for the
disputed sense. Today, the ‘incorrect’ use of disinterested is widespread:
around 20 per cent of citations on the British National Corpus for disin-
terested are for this sense.
Besides usage notes, CED4 also has a label ‘not standard’ to apply to appropriate
items, such as ain’t or worser. LDEL2 has the labels ‘nonstandard’ and ‘substand-
ard’ and distinguishes them as follows:
The label nonstandard is used for words or meanings that are quite
commonly used but considered incorrect by most educated users of the
language:
lay . . . vi . . . 5 nonstandard LIE
The label substandard is used for words or meanings used by some speakers
but not generally considered to be part of standard English:
learn . . . vb . . . 2 substandard to teach. (p. xviii)
This is about as prescriptive as it gets. CED4 labels this sense of learn as ‘not
standard’, and it provides a usage note to discuss the differences between lay and
lie. By comparison, we might note that Chambers labels ain’t as ‘coll(oquial)’ and
the disputed usages of learn and lay as ‘illit(erate)’.
10 Etymology
abacus late Middle English (denoting a board strewn with sand on which
to draw figures): from Latin, from Greek abax, abak- ‘slab, drawing board’,
of Semitic origin; probably related to Hebrew sAbAq ‘dust’.
Some etymologies, as in this one for abacus, give the meanings of these original
forms, and this has led to the so-called ‘etymological fallacy’, according to which
the ‘real meaning’ of a word is its original meaning. So, it is argued, the real
meaning of decimate is ‘kill or remove every tenth person’, because it derives
from the Latin decimus ‘tenth’, and indeed the verb decimare referred to the
Roman practice of killing every tenth soldier in a mutinous legion. But it is a
fallacy to argue in this way, because words undergo semantic as well as phono-
logical and orthographic changes. The meaning of decimate has changed to de-
note any large-scale killing or destruction, and, in any case, for English users the
connection with decimus has been all but lost (though compare decimal ).
Etymology 119
In the case of words having an Old English origin, the etymology may addi-
tionally record ‘cognate’ words in other Germanic languages. The languages
concerned are the Scandinavian languages (Old Norse, Swedish, Danish), Dutch,
and German. All these languages are thought to derive from a common ancestor
language, which has been termed ‘Germanic’, but for which no records survive.
The cognates, therefore, demonstrate the Germanic origin of the Old English
words concerned. For example, NODE gives the etymology of speak as: ‘Old
English sprecan, later specan, of West Germanic origin; related to Dutch spreken
and German sprechen’. CED4 gives the etymology of through as: ‘Old English
thurh; related to Old Frisian thruch, Old Saxon thuru, Old High German duruh’.
The etymology of some words can be traced to particular cultural beliefs and
practices, sometimes known as ‘folk etymology’. For example, the NODE
etymology for bigwig reads: ‘early 18th cent.: so named from the large wigs
formerly worn by distinguished men’; and the CED4 etymology for crocodile
tears reads: ‘from the belief that crocodiles wept over their prey to allure further
victims’.
To interpret etymologies, not only do you need to understand what the
various parts of the entry might signify, e.g. immediate origin, ultimate source,
cognates, folk etymology, but you also need to be able to make sense of the
language names used, e.g. Old High German, Middle Dutch, Late Latin, which
in many dictionaries, especially those of concise size or smaller, will be in the
form of abbreviations (OHG, MDu, LL). For the Germanic languages and French,
the terms ‘Old’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Modern’ correspond approximately to their use
for English, i.e. pre-medieval, medieval, and post-medieval. In the case of Latin,
the plain term relates to the classical period, and ‘Late Latin’ to the period from
approximately 200 AD to 400 AD. A label ‘New Latin’ (NL) is used to refer to
words coined in Latin since the Renaissance, especially scientific terms. Where
these are common to a number of (European) languages, the label ISV, for
‘International Scientific Vocabulary’, is used by W3 and some other dictionaries.
The following discussion and illustration of etymologies will serve to illuminate
some of these points.
lavish late Middle English (as a noun denoting profusion): from Old French
lavasse ‘deluge of rain’, from laver ‘to wash’, from Latin lavare.
astray Middle English (in the sense ‘distant from the correct path’): from
an Anglo-Norman French variant of Old French estraie, past participle of
estraier, based on Latin extra ‘out of bounds’ + vagari ‘wander’.
Some of the Latinate words borrowed into Middle English come not from Old
French but directly from Latin (1885 in NODE). This is mostly in the latter part
of the period, as the transition to the Renaissance begins, e.g.
Etymology 121
interrupt late Middle English: from Latin interrupt- ‘broken, interrupted’,
from the verb interrumpere, from inter- ‘between’ + rumpere ‘to break’.
‘Latin’ is a label that occurs with high frequency in etymologies, nearly 12,000
times in COD10 (18 per cent of the headwords), and over 15,000 times in NODE.
Romance languages, i.e. those descended from Latin, that also feature in
etymologies include: French (10,500 in NODE), Italian (1,500), Spanish (1,100),
and Portuguese (300). Direct borrowings from French include: abattoir (nine-
teenth century), democrat (late eighteenth century), lacquer (late sixteenth cen-
tury, ultimately from Portuguese), tirade (early nineteenth century), voyeur (early
twentieth century) – as well as numerous food and culinary terms. Italian has
also given a number of food words, as well as much of English musical terminol-
ogy, e.g. adagio, al dente, finale, lasagne, pergola, saltimbocca, vibrato. While Spanish
and Portuguese have added words from themselves, they have also been vehicles
for words from more exotic languages, from days of colonisation and empire,
e.g. amok (via Portuguese from Malay), embargo (early seventeenth-century
Spanish), guanaco (via Spanish from Quechuan), marmalade (late fifteenth-
century Portuguese).
The other, more recent source of Latin borrowings are the neo-Latin ‘classi-
cal compounds’ (see 1.6), mostly technical terms of the sciences, technology
and medicine. Classical compounds are also formed with elements taken from
Greek. In fact, more of the ‘combining forms’ that make up classical com-
pounds are derived from Greek than from Latin. The etymology of the com-
bining form is usually given, but not necessarily of the classical compound,
unless its formation has some peculiarity, e.g. (from NODE):
Finally under this heading, there follows a selection of etymologies for words
borrowed into English from around the world:
a. OF. cenith (F. zénith) or med.L. cenit (cf. It. zenit, Sp. cenit, Pg. zenith, G.
zenith, etc.), obscurely ad. Arab. samt, in samt ar-rAs lit. way or path over the
head (samt way, al the, rAs head); cf. AZIMUTH (al the, sumEt pl. of samt).
This needs some interpretation, if you are not familiar with reading OED
etymologies. The initial ‘a. OF . . . or med.L.’ means ‘adopted from Old
French . . . or medieval Latin’; the modern French (F.) is given in brackets;
then cognates are given (‘cf.’ = confer ‘compare’) in Italian (It.), Spanish (Sp.),
Portuguese (Pg.) and German (G.). The word is said to be ‘obscurely adapted
(ad.) from Arabic (Arab.), and the supposed Arabic origin is explained (lit. =
‘literally’, pl. = ‘plural’). The OED makes a distinction in borrowing between
‘adoption’ (with little or no alteration to the form of the borrowed word) and
‘adaptation’ (where the spelling/pronunciation is conformed to the conven-
tions of English).
The SOED, as might be expected, given its smaller compass, presents a trun-
cated version of this etymology:
OFr. cenit (mod. zenith) or med.L cenit (also zenith), ult. f. Arab. samt in
samt-ar-ra’s ‘path over the head’: cf. azimuth.
C17: from French cenith, from Medieval Latin, from Old Spanish zenit,
based on Arabic samt, as in samt arrAs path over one’s head, from samt way,
path + al the + rAs head
late Middle English: from Old French or medieval Latin cenit, based on
Arabic samt (ar-ra’s) ‘path (over the head)’.
NODE and CED disagree on the entry of the word into English; the first
quotation in OED2 is dated 1387, followed by a 1391 quotation from Chaucer,
which would seem to support the NODE date of ‘late Middle English’. How-
ever, the Spanish part of the derivation noted in CED is supported by Skeat’s
(1961) Concise Etymological Dictionary:
Etymology 125
Zenith (F. – Span. – Arab.) M.E. senyth. – O.F. cenith; F. zénith. – Span.
zenit, O.Span. zenith. – Arab. samt, a way, road, path, tract, quarter; whence
samt-ur-ras, the zenith, vertical point of the heavens; also as as-samt, an
azimuth. Samt was pronounced semt, of which Span. zenit is a corruption;
again, samt is here short for samt-ur-ras or semt-er-ras (as above), lit. the way
overhead, from ras, the head. See Azimuth.
OED: ME. carre, a. ONF. carre:-late L. carra, a parallel form to carrus, carrum
(whence It., Sp. carro, Pr. car, char, ONF. car, F. char, ME. CHAR), a kind of
2-wheeled wagon for transporting burdens. The L. was a. OCelt. *karr-os,
*karr-om, whence OIr. (also mod.Ir. and Gael.) carr masc. ‘wagon, chariot,’
OWelsh carr, Welsh càr, Manx carr, Bret. kar. (Late L. carra also gave WGer.
carra fem., in OHG. charra, Ger. karre, MDu. carre, Du. kar fem., Sw. karra,
Da. karre.)
CED: C14: from Anglo-French carre, ultimately related to Latin carra, carrum
two-wheeled wagon, probably of Celtic origin; compare Old Irish carr
NODE: late Middle English (in the general sense ‘wheeled vehicle’): from
Old Northern French carre, based on Latin carrum, carrus, of Celtic origin
SKEAT: (F. – C.) M.E. carre. – O.NorthF. carre, a car (Ducange, s.v.
Marcellum). – Late L. carra, f.; allied to L. carrus, a car; of Gaulish origin. –
Bret. karr, a chariot; W. car, O.Gael. cár, Irish carr. Allied to L. currus, a
chariot; Brugm. i. § 516.
126 Etymology
(Note: F = ‘French’, C = ‘Celtic’, s.v. = sub verbo ‘under the word’ (Ducange
refers to ‘Ducange Anglicus’, Vulgar Tongue, 1857), W = ‘Welsh’, Brugm =
‘Brugmann, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik (Outline of Comparative
Grammar), 1897.)
From these examples, you can see how the etymology varies according to the
type of dictionary and its intended user group. By and large, the historical
dictionaries are aimed at scholars and students of the language, as indeed is the
specialist etymological dictionary (Skeat). The assumption of the general-
purpose dictionaries is that, within their compass, a basic set of information
about etymology is of interest to the ordinary dictionary user. It is this assump-
tion that we will now examine.
We introduced the four major British learners’ dictionaries in 6.6 and noted in
3.2 that such dictionaries have been at the forefront of lexicographical innova-
tion in the last half-century. In this chapter, we examine this dictionary type in
some detail and show how they have been developed to meet the perceived
needs of learners of English as a second or foreign language. Such dictionaries
are aimed at the intermediate to advanced learner. They are based on the obser-
vation that, as learners become more proficient, they need to move from a
bilingual dictionary as their lexical reference source to a monolingual diction-
ary. Monolingual learners’ dictionaries (MLDs) have therefore attempted to ful-
fil this need by providing information about the meaning and use of English
words that in many respects goes well beyond that offered in bilingual dictionaries.
joyride If someone goes on a joyride, they steal a car and drive around in it
at high speed.
132 Dictionaries for learners
jukebox A jukebox is a record player in a place such as a pub or a bar. You
put a coin in and choose the record you want to hear.
junk You can use junk to refer to old and second-hand goods that people
buy and collect.
Second, all the examples are from the corpus – ‘real English’ – sometimes with
minor adaptation or truncation. Third, the grammatical information is not
included in the main entry, but provided in an ‘extra column’, to the right of
the main column; this column also includes information about synonyms and
antonyms. Fourth, there is only one entry per spelling, and senses are listed in
frequency order; all inflections are given, whether regular or irregular. Each
sense begins a new paragraph, and nearly all senses have at least one example.
The last MLD to enter the market did so in 1995, the ‘year of the dictionar-
ies’, in which OALD published its fifth edition, LDOCE its third and COBUILD
its second. The new dictionary was the Cambridge International Dictionary of Eng-
lish, edited by Paul Proctor, who had been responsible for the first edition of
LDOCE. CIDE took the opposite decision on headwords to COBUILD: each
major sense has a separate entry, followed where appropriate by a ‘guide word’
to the meaning; for example job has six entries: job employment, job piece
of work, job duty, job problem, job example, job crime. Every grammatical
pattern is illustrated by an example, and examples also show typical collocations.
Indeed the dictionary pays a lot of attention to the phraseological potential of
words, and it includes an extensive ‘Phrase Index’, in which phrases are entered
under all of their constituents, each of which has a reference to the page, col-
umn and line number where it is treated in the dictionary. The ‘International’
in the title is justified on the one hand by its treatment of American and Austral-
ian, as well as British English, and on the other by its tables of ‘false friends’ for
some sixteen languages, including Japanese, Korean and Thai. The latter derive
from an analysis of the Cambridge Learner Corpus, a corpus of learners’ English;
the main dictionary is based on the 100 million-word Cambridge Language
Survey corpus.
The EFL market is a lucrative one for publishers, and an advanced MLD is
only one publication among many, including course books, grammars, readers
and so on, which serve the needs of learners and their teachers. The competi-
tion has been an incentive to improve and innovate, and as successive editions
have appeared, a clear development can be perceived. Moreover, MLD lexico-
graphy has been extensively debated both by practising lexicographers (e.g.
Rundell 1998) and by academics (e.g. Herbst and Popp 1999), with increasing
attention being paid to the needs of learners and the reference skills that they
can be expected to possess.
The aim is that the user should be able to glance down the entry and quickly
find the sense relevant to their look-up by relating the guideword to the context
in which the word being looked up is situated.
The other problem identified in relation to decoding concerns understand-
ing the definition that is encountered. We noted earlier that LDOCE innovated
with a specified restricted defining vocabulary, though it must be said that
the original OALD compilers were also aware of the need to define within the
supposed vocabulary of the users. The current editions of LDOCE, OALD and
CIDE all have a specified defining vocabulary, which is listed in an appendix to
the dictionary. COBUILD’s solution is to define using full sentences, a practice
that is used in some instances by the other MLDs. Compare the definitions for
the noun knuckle:
134 Dictionaries for learners
OALD6: any of the joints in the fingers, especially those connecting the
fingers with the rest of the hand – picture at BODY
LDOCE3: the joints in your fingers including the ones where your fingers
join your hands
COBUILD3: Your knuckles are the rounded pieces of bone that form
lumps on your hands where your fingers join your hands, and where your
fingers bend.
CIDE: one of the joints of the fingers, esp. between the hand and the
fingers . . . PIC Body.
You will notice that two of the dictionaries refer the user to an illustration
(picture); LDOCE also contains pictures, though COBUILD does not. The
pictures are usually line drawings dispersed throughout the text, though LDOCE3
and OALD6 also contain full-page colour plates. Pictures supplement the verbal
definitions, especially for nouns with a concrete reference, and they are often
grouped (e.g. under ‘body’) so that the terms for a lexical field are displayed
together.
Now consider the definitions for the verb smear:
All the definitions have the essential components of ‘spread’, ‘liquid/soft sub-
stance’ ‘over surface’; OALD6 and LDOCE3 also include a component of ‘care-
lessly’. Note the capital letters for oily in the OALD6 definition, because it is not
in its defining vocabulary; COBUILD has no such restriction on using it. Note,
too, the use of brackets in the CIDE definition, in the conventional manner, for
indicating typical collocations, in this case as object of the verb. The COBUILD3
definition is rather cumbersome because it is also indicating the typical patterns
for the verb (smear a surface with a substance/smear a substance on a surface),
which are indicated separately in the other dictionaries, either in formulae (~ sth
on/over sth | ~ sth with sth – OALD6) or in examples (. . . smeared the walls of
their cells with excrement – CIDE).
Let us now examine the definitions for the abstract adjective versatile:
OALD6: (approving) 1 (of a person) able to do many different things. 2 (of
food, a building, etc.) having many different uses
Dictionaries for learners 135
LDOCE3: approving 1 good at doing a lot of different things and able to
learn new skills quickly and easily. 2 having many different uses
COBUILD3: 1 If you say that a person is versatile, you approve of them
because they have many different skills. 2 A tool, machine, or material that
is versatile can be used for many different purposes.
CIDE: able to change easily from one activity to another or able to be used
for many different purposes.
All apart from CIDE separate out the use of versatile to refer to people as against
things, though LDOCE is not as explicit as OALD and COBUILD. However,
all four dictionaries contain examples that make the distinction clear, though
the range of ‘things’ to which versatile may be applied is not clearly stated:
OALD suggests ‘food’ and ‘buildings’, while COBUILD specifically mentions
‘tool’, ‘machine’ and ‘material’. OALD and LDOCE have the attitudinal label
‘approving’, which is incorporated into the definition in COBUILD and not
mentioned in CIDE. This, together with the preceding sets of definitions, gives
some impression of how successful MLDs have been in making definitions
understandable to their learner-users.
OALD2: v.t. & i. 1. (VP 1, 2, 11, 17B) offer or put forward for considera-
tion, as a suggestion, plan, or purpose: I ~ an early start (to start early, that
we should start early, starting early). We ~ leaving at noon. The motion was ~d by
Mr X and seconded by Mr Y. ~ a toast (sb.’s health), ask persons to drink
sb.’s health or happiness. 2. (VP 1, 21) offer marriage (to sb.): Did he ~
(marriage) to you? 3. put forward (sb.’s name) ( for an office, for member-
ship of a club, etc.): I ~ Mr Smith for chairman. Will you please ~ me for your
club?
OALD3: vt, vi 1 [VP6A,D,7A,9] offer or put forward for consideration,
as a suggestion, plan or purpose: I ~ starting early/an early start/to start early/
that we should start early. We ~ leaving at noon. The motion was ~d by Mr X
and seconded by Mr Y. ~ a toast/sb’s health, ask persons to drink sb’s
health or happiness. 2 [VP6A,2A] ~ (marriage) (to sb), offer marriage. 3
[VP14] ~ sb (for sth), put forward (sb’s name) for an office/for member-
ship of a club/etc: I ~ Mr Smith for chairman. Will you please ~ me for your
club?
The Verb Patterns were dropped from OALD after the third edition. In the
latest (sixth) edition, the formulae are linked to examples, so that coding and
exemplification work together:
OALD6: verb
SUGGEST PLAN 1 ( formal) to suggest a plan, an idea, etc. for people to
think about and decide on: [VN] The government proposed changes to the voting
system. 䉫 What would you propose? 䉫 [Vthat] She proposed that the book be
banned. 䉫 (BrE also) She proposed that the book should be banned. 䉫 [VNthat]
It was proposed that the president be elected for a period of two years. 䉫 [V-ing]
He proposed changing the name of the company. 䉫 [VNtoinf] It was proposed to
pay the money from public funds. HELP This pattern is only used in the passive.
Dictionaries for learners 137
INTEND 2 to intend to do sth: [Vtoinf ] What do you propose to do now? 䉫
[V-ing] How do you propose getting home?
MARRIAGE 3 ~ (sth) (to sb) to ask sb to marry you: [V] He was afraid
that if he proposed she might refuse. 䉫 She proposed to me! 䉫 [VN] to propose
marriage.
AT FORMAL MEETING 4 [VN] ~ sth| ~ sb (for/as sth) to suggest sth
at a formal meeting and ask people to vote on it: I propose Tom Ellis for
chairman. 䉫 to propose a motion (= to be the main speaker in support of an
idea at a formal debate) – compare OPPOSE, SECOND
SUGGEST EXPLANATION 5 [VN] ( formal) to suggest an explanation
of sth for people to consider SYN PROPOUND: She proposed a possible
solution to the mystery.
IDM propose a toast (to sb) | propose sb’s health to ask people to
wish sb health, happiness and success by raising their glasses and drinking:
I’d like to propose a toast to the bride and groom.
You can see the whole variety of means in this entry by which grammatical
and other pattern information is being communicated: formulae ( [Vthat],
~ sb (for/as sth) ), examples (She proposed that the book be banned), and phrases
(propose a motion). Coding and examples work together in an even more
integrated manner in CIDE:
The coding formulae are contained in square brackets at the end of the exam-
ples, and the example sentences contain bold items that also indicate grammati-
cal patterning. In COBUILD, as indicated earlier, the whole-sentence definitions
contribute towards identifying the grammatical patterns in which the word
typically occurs with the sense being defined. Additionally, the Extra Column
contains more explicit coding for the syntactic operation of words, e.g. for
propose, V n/-ing, V that, V to-inf, V to n, V, V n to n.
The second main way in which MLDs provide encoding information for
learners is in respect of lexical patterning, specifically collocations, idioms, and
other types of phraseology. In COBUILD, the definitions again have the task of
138 Dictionaries for learners
indicating typical collocational patterns. Consider the following definitions for
propose and proposition:
In the case of the propose definition, it indicates that the subject of propose is a
person (by the use of you), and that the object is either the words theory or
explanation, or something that counts as either of these. In the case of the pro-
position definition, the adjectives difficult and attractive are indicated as typical
collocates for this sense of the noun. In CIDE, collocations can be indicated in
the conventional way by means of brackets (see the entry for propose above), but
more usually by using bold type in the examples, e.g. for malaise:
These examples show that typical adjectives accompanying malaise include deep,
general, spiritual and economic, and that it enters into the phrase a symptom
of . . . malaise. OALD6 has a ‘study page’ on collocations; it, too, relies on the
examples to indicate typical collocations. For malaise it has:
MLDs take both grammatical and lexical patterning seriously and they have
come a long way in their treatment of these areas since Hornby and his col-
leagues identified them as the major encoding needs of learners of English.
Learners’ encoding needs are taken account of by two further types of infor-
mation provided by MLDs. The first of these is the explicit indication of sense
relations (2.3.3) such as synonymy and antonymy. COBUILD has been espe-
cially prolific with this kind of information, though more so in the first edition
than in the later ones; the first included information on hyponymy, not subse-
quently included. In COBUILD the information on sense relations is given in
the Extra Column by means of the symbols ‘=’ (for synonyms) and ‘≠’ (for
antonyms). For example, heavy as in a heavy meal is marked in COBUILD3 with
‘= filling’, ‘≠ light’; and as in the air is heavy, it is marked with ‘= oppressive’, ‘≠
cool, fresh’. OALD6 marks synonyms with SYN and antonyms with OPP, e.g.
impute has SYN ATTRIBUTE, and left-winger has OPP RIGHT-WINGER;
but OALD6 is more sparing with this information than COBUILD.
The second additional type of encoding information comes in the form of
usage notes of various kinds. Some of this is in the form of labelling, as in NSDs,
though sometimes with a little variation, e.g. OALD6 has the symbol of an
exclamation mark in a triangle to warn users that the word or sense is slang or
taboo. COBUILD2 has the term PRAGMATICS in the Extra Column to
show that usage information is shown within the definition; in COBUILD3 the
definition no longer contains this information and a specific label such as ‘dis-
approval’ or ‘informal’ has been substituted for PRAGMATICS in the Extra
Column. The other dictionaries have ‘usage notes’ (LDOCE) of various kinds,
as well as more extensive discussion on ‘study pages’ (OALD6) or in ‘language
portraits’ (CIDE). OALD6, for example, has scattered through the dictionary
boxed items entitled ‘Vocabulary Building’ (e.g. ways of saying approximately),
‘Which Word?’ (e.g. as/like), ‘British/American’ (e.g. already/just/yet), ‘Gram-
mar Point’ (e.g. avenge/revenge), ‘Word Family’ (e.g. clear – clarity – clarify),
‘More About’ (e.g. of course). There is a recognition that learners need a
range of information about words – grammatical, semantic and pragmatic –
in order to be able to construct accurate and appropriate sentences in the
target language.
If you look up the word dictionary in a dictionary, you will find a definition
along the lines of:
Ælfric’s hope was to encompass the whole vocabulary in his scheme, though he
recognised that he had not done so. The topical organisation certainly betrays
the concerns of an early medieval churchman.
As dictionary making, both bilingual and monolingual, developed, the alpha-
betical tradition dominated, but, especially under the influence of the Renais-
sance, thematic wordbooks were also compiled, most famously that by the
Moravian Comenius ( Johann Amos Komensky, 1592–1670) under the title
Ianua linguarum reserata (The Gate of Tongues Unlocked), of which a Latin and a
German version were published in 1631. In English, the most famous work of
the time is that of John Wilkins, as part of his proposal for a ‘universal language’,
with the title An Essay Towards a Real Character, And a Philosophical Language,
published in 1668. As part of his proposal, Wilkins put forward a scheme for
classifying the vocabulary of any language; at its most general level, it is de-
scribed in eleven chapters in the Essay (Hüllen 1999: 253):
I the transcendentals, the general notions which determine all the sub-
sequent principles of order. They include ‘discourse’, that is ‘words’ as
opposed to ‘things’
II God, the creator, and the creation, that is the world observed collectively
III together with all the following chapters is devoted to the world observed
distributively . . . the inanimate elements under the ‘predicament’, that
is, the category of substance
IV the vegetative species
V the sensitive species
VI the significant parts of vegetative and sensitive species
VII various phenomena belonging to ‘quantity’, a category which is sub-
sumed under the category ‘accident’. So are the following four chapters.
VIII various phenomena belonging to ‘quality’
IX various phenomena belonging to ‘action’
X various phenomena belonging to ‘private relation’
XI various phenomena belonging to ‘public relation’.
The object aimed at in the present undertaking is . . . the idea being given,
to find the word, or words, by which that idea may be most fitly and aptly
expressed.
(Introduction)
Table 12.1
Class Section
IV. ORDER
Each of the ‘Sections’ is further subdivided into the lowest level of sets of
words arranged where applicable in pairs of opposites, e.g. under Class I, Sec-
tion IV (see Table 12.2).
The sets of words and phrases are listed in the main body of the Thesaurus, on
two-column pages, under word classes, with nouns first, followed by verbs,
then adjectives and adverbs. No other information is given – no definitions,
pronunciation, or etymology; it is intended as a ‘storehouse’ or ‘treasure’ (=
Greek thesauros) of words, which a writer will plunder for the one that is apt for
their purpose.
If you are familiar with Roget’s Thesaurus, you will know that about the last
third of the work is taken up with an alphabetical ‘Index’, and many users find
this to be the most convenient route into the thesaurus. During his lifetime – he
died in 1869 at the age of 90 – Peter Mark Roget did not include an index in
any of the editions that he compiled and edited; that defeated the purpose of the
work. It was his son, John Lewis Roget, who added the Index; he also under-
took a major revision of the work in 1879 and continued to edit it until his
death in 1908. The editorship then passed to his son, Samuel Romilly Roget,
who undertook a major revision in 1936, and then sold the rights to Longman
in 1952, the year before he died (McArthur 1992: 871). Roget’s Thesaurus re-
mains as an institution among reference works for the English language and as a
monument to the thematic tradition of wordbooks.
Each of these classes is further subdivided. For example, ‘9. Language and Com-
munication’ has a general class and seven subclasses:
Under each of these is listed the modern English word or paraphrase, followed
by the OE term, e.g.
Each category is further subdivided, e.g. 10.6 gives words for ‘Bread, Oatcakes,
etc.’ and 10.7 for ‘Cakes, Pastry, Biscuits’. Within the subdivisions, the items
are listed in alphabetical order; 10.6 contains almost 90 lexemes, some of which
are regionally restricted – the relevant areas or counties of Scotland are indi-
cated, e.g.
The classification which has resulted from examination of the data is based
on a modified folk taxonomy. There are three major divisions: (I) The
World, including the physical universe, plants and animals; (II) The Mind,
covering man’s mental activities; and (III) Society, which deals with social
structures and artefacts. Within these major divisions the material is
arranged in numbered hierarchical categories, each consisting of a defining
heading followed by chronological lists of all the words, with their dates of
currency, ever used as synonyms or near synonyms for the definition.
(HTE website)
The database of the HTE will be constructed in such a way that sophisticated
searches will be possible, e.g. to find all the words meaning ‘laugh’ that came
into the language between 1300 and 1500, or to find all the words current in
Renaissance English for a particular area of meaning. The Thesaurus of Old
English, considered earlier, is an offshoot of this project, but while the OE
thesaurus presents, in lexical field arrangement, a snapshot of the vocabulary at
a particular time period, the HTE will show how the vocabulary has developed
from OE over time, lexical field by lexical field. Further information on the
HTE project, together with examples, can be viewed on the Historical Thesaurus
of English website (see References).The final example of a specialist thematic
dictionary is specialist in two ways: it is restricted to a particular area of vocabu-
lary, that of science, and it is directed specifically at learners of English: the
Longman Dictionary of Scientific Usage (Godman and Payne 1979). This dictionary
is aimed at those who are studying science through the medium of English and
for whom English is not their first language. The vocabulary of science is pre-
sented under 19 broad divisions, numbered ‘A’ to ‘U’ (‘I’ and ‘O’ are not used).
Division A contains ‘Basic Terms’, and like the other divisions it is subdivided
into ‘Sets’:
AA Space
AB Matter
AC Shape
AD Existence
AE Constitution
AF Movement
154 Abandoning the alphabet
AG Change
AH Time
AJ Process
AK Knowledge
AL Word analysis
AM Statement
AN Measurement
AP Relationship
AQ Experiment.
The remaining divisions contain the ‘Scientific Terms’; each division contains
sets that are semantically related, e.g. H has the following sets:
HA Irritability
HB Nervous System
HC Sight
HD Hearing
HE Sense Organs.
Within each set, the individual terms are arranged, not alphabetically, but in
order to form a coherent account of the area of science, proceeding from those
terms that have a more general reference to those that are more specific. Each
term is provided with a word class label, a definition and explanation, occasion-
ally an example sentence, and extensive cross-references, both to earlier and
later within the set and to other sets. For example, from Set HD ‘Hearing’:
HD001 hearing (n.) One of the senses of animals, concerned with the
stimulus of sound. Hearing is well developed in tetrapod vertebrates, but
poorly developed in fishes; it is well developed in insects but not in most
other invertebrates. – hear (v.) ↓ AUDIBILITY • SCOLOPHORE
• STATOCYST • LATERAL LINE SYSTEM • AUDIBLE • EAR •
MIDDLE EAR • INNER EAR • MEMBRANOUS LABYRINTH •
COCHLEA → IRRITABILITY
HD005 statocyst (n.) (In some invertebrates) an organ of balance, con-
sisting of a vesicle containing statoliths with sensory cells on the vesicle
walls, Hair-like processes on the sensory cells are stimulated by the statoliths
when the animal moves. ↓ OTIDIUM • OTOCYST • STATOLITH ↑
HEARING
What these four examples show is that the thematic tradition in lexicography
can be exploited imaginatively to present information about words for specific
purposes, where an alphabetical arrangement would be incapable of yielding
the desired insights for the intended uses and users.
The alphabetical dictionary has a logic, but it is not the logic of everyday
life. In principle, one feels, words should be defined in the company they
usually keep. Two famous moves in this direction have been the Janua
Linguarum Reserata in 1631, the work of the Bohemian educator Comenius,
and Roget’s Thesaurus, first published by Longman in 1852. The Longman
Lexicon of Contemporary English belongs in this tradition.
Comenius had a hundred chapters and a religious bias, while Roget used
a scheme of universal concepts as a framework for his prodigious lists. The
156 Abandoning the alphabet
Lexicon, however, has only fourteen ‘semantic fields’ of a pragmatic, every-
day nature.
(Preface, p. vi)
Each broad ‘semantic field’ is subdivided, and within the subdivisions the lexical
items are arranged in related sets, often belonging to the same word class. Each
item is provided with definitions and examples. Although its compilation pre-
ceded it, McArthur had access to the LDOCE1 (1978) materials, so that the
entries in the Lexicon match those in the Dictionary. The careful arrangement of
items in sets and the provision of definitions and examples enable a learner to
understand the differences between related words and to choose the one appro-
priate to the particular context of use. By way of illustration, here are the sub-
divisions of Field F, followed by the entries for the set F173:
long wish v F6
measurement adj J63
distance or time adj L139, N307
The index thus enables a learner to quickly review the semantic range that a
word has, as well as to locate the item in the appropriate semantic set.
Unlike Roget’s Thesaurus, McArthur’s Lexicon provides in the thematic for-
mat the range of information that would be expected in a dictionary, at least for
learners. In that sense it is a true ‘thematic dictionary’. It is to be regretted that
it has never been updated or expanded, or, indeed, that no publisher has dared
to produce such a work as a complement to a general-purpose native speaker
dictionary. The semantic classification of the words in CIDE on the CD-ROM
(see 11.5) proceeds along the same lines and encompasses all the 50,000 head-
words of CIDE, but the electronic format does not allow the overview of the
structure of the vocabulary that the printed Lexicon does. After all, the basic
arrangement of the entries in CIDE on CD-ROM is still the alphabetical for-
mat of the print version.
There is one further reference work for learners that incorporates some of the
insights from the thematic tradition: the Longman Language Activator (1993),
which advertises itself as ‘the world’s first production dictionary’. It addresses
specifically the needs of learners in writing and speaking to be able to choose the
appropriate word and to use it correctly. The Activator is constructed around
1052 ‘concepts’ or ‘key words’:
158 Abandoning the alphabet
These concepts express the meanings at the heart of the English language.
It should be pointed out straight away, however, that the Activator does not
address itself to words for ‘real world’ items, some of which, of course, also
belong to the core of English. We believe that concrete nouns, and content
words in general, present fewer, less serious problems of correct use for
students, so you will not find different types of transport, dogs, machinery
or buildings here. That is left to the Longman Lexicon, which deals effec-
tively with semantic fields, including real world items.
The concepts . . . have clear, direct names such as FAR, SAD/UN-
HAPPY, HOPE, INTEND, EASY, FAULT/STH WRONG, and BUT.
(Introduction, p. F8)
The key word entry is structured in the following way. If the word has more
than one broad meaning, these are identified first and a reference given to the
keyword under which each meaning is explained. For example, the key word
modern has two meanings identified:
Then, under each key word, lexical items are grouped together in related sets,
with a summary of the sets at the beginning of the entry, e.g. for modern:
1 words for describing machines, systems, processes etc that have been devel-
oped using the most recent ideas and equipment
2 using, or willing to use, the most recent ideas and ways of thinking
3 words for describing modern art, literature, music, etc
4 to change something in order to make it modern.
The items in each of these sets are listed, together with the description (as
above) at the beginning of the set. For Set 2 of modern, the items are: modern,
progressive, innovative, forward-looking, move with the times, go-ahead. Each of the
lexical items is provided with an entry including pronunciation, word class,
definition and examples.
The key words are arranged alphabetically in the dictionary, and the alpha-
betical list contains all the lexemes treated in the dictionary. Those that are not
key words are cross-referenced to the key word under which they are treated.
The Activator has its headwords ordered alphabetically, but under 1052 of them
– the ‘key words’ – a thematic approach is taken and lexical items are organised
into lexical sets.
13 Compiling dictionaries
I certainly do not know all lexicographic projects past and present; but of
those I know not a single one was finished in the time and for the money
originally planned.
(cited in Landau 2001: 347)
This was indeed true of some of the more famous dictionaries – Johnson’s,
scheduled for three years and taking nine; the OED, with Murray contracted by
the Oxford Delegacy to produce in ten years and four volumes, taking fifty
years and ten (subsequently twelve) volumes. But with the advent of computer
technology, Zgusta’s pessimism is probably no longer justified: OED2 was pub-
lished on time in 1989, and it is noticeable that the timespan between editions
of dictionaries appears to be decreasing, e.g. COD7 – 1982, COD8 – 1990,
COD9 – 1995, COD10 – 1999, with an updated edition of COD10 in 2001.
The costs associated with compiling a dictionary are quite different from
those for other kinds of book publication, as Sidney Landau observes:
Most books cost comparatively little to prepare (the plant cost, in publish-
ing argot) but a great deal to produce (paper, printing, and binding costs).
The opposite is true of dictionaries, where the cost of production, though
hardly negligible, is small compared to the huge editorial development
costs, which must be amortized over a much longer period of time than
book publishers are generally familiar with. Data-management costs (sys-
tems analysis, computer programming and processing) are also much higher
than they are for other books.
(Landau 2001: 348)
The size of the budget and its distribution between the various processes of
dictionary compilation may have a significant effect on what the dictionary will
turn out to be like in the end. If time, effort and money is focused on one,
perhaps novel, aspect of the dictionary, this may have a detrimental effect on the
quality of other aspects: usage information may be prioritised over etymology,
for example.
166 Compiling dictionaries
13.2 The data
Having decided the headword list and made all the other necessary preliminary
planning decisions, the issue arises of where the data for the dictionary is going
to come from. There are essentially three possible sources of data: previous
dictionaries, citations, (computer) corpora. Any newly published dictionary will
be either a new edition of an existing line of dictionaries or a new departure. In
both cases, the dictionary stands in a long tradition of dictionary making (Chap-
ters 4 to 6), and, whether consciously or not, previous dictionaries exert their
influence. Samuel Johnson used one of Nathaniel Bailey’s dictionaries, Noah
Webster used Johnson’s, F.G. and H.W. Fowler used the OED for the first
edition of the COD. It would be foolish, even when the boundaries of lexico-
graphy are being extended, to ignore the achievements of the past, though it
may be sometimes more sensible to borrow the principles rather than the con-
tent from previous dictionaries. Landau (2001: 346) goes so far as to assert: ‘All
commercial dictionaries are based to some extent on preexisting works.’
Publishers with long-established dictionary departments build up an exten-
sive archive of citations, often going back many decades. They continue to have
a reading programme, scouring recent publications for new words or new uses
of existing words. They may have readers in-house, but will often invite inter-
ested members of the public to contribute material as well. Longman ran a
‘Wordwatch’ programme for a number of years during the 1980s, which con-
tributed to the Longman Register of New Words (Ayto 1989, 1990). Oxford has a
‘World Reading Programme’, an international network of some sixty readers,
who contribute some 18,000 items a month for inclusion in the ‘Oxford Bank
of New Words’ (cf. Ayto 1999). The collection of citations has a long history,
going back at least to Samuel Johnson, who extracted material from the litera-
ture of the day for inclusion in his dictionary. The OED was founded on the
practice of recruiting voluntary readers to undertake the reading of specific
works or authors and to submit appropriate citations. Among the instructions
issued by James Murray, when he renewed the call for voluntary readers in
1879, were the following:
Make a quotation for every word that strikes you as rare, obsolete, old-
fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way.
Take a special note of passages which show or imply that a word is either
new and tentative, or needing explanation as obsolete or archaic, and which
thus help to fix the date of its introduction or disuse.
Make as many quotations as convenient to you for ordinary words, when
these are used significantly, and help by the context to explain their own
meaning, or show their use.
(Murray 1977: 347)
Readers were to write their quotations on slips of paper the size of ‘a half-sheet
of note-paper’, together with full bibliographical information; Murray gives the
following specimen (from Murray 1977: 350):
Compiling dictionaries 167
Diplomatist, n.
1860. J. L. MOTLEY, United Netherlands (ed. 1868), I. ii. 24.
If diplomatic adroitness consists mainly in the power to deceive, never were more
adroit diplomatists than those of the sixteenth century.
It is estimated that some five million quotations in this form were submitted by
some 2,000 readers to the OED editors, of which 1.8 million appeared in the
first edition of the dictionary (Berg 1993).
These days, dictionary departments that have a reading programme will also
derive data from computer corpora. The reading programme may be only in
specialised areas, as indicated by the Editor-in-Chief of ECED:
Where did the Encarta Concise English Dictionary’s editors find the informa-
tion on which to base their definitions? The Bloomsbury Corpus of World
English, which now has over 150 million words, provided the main evid-
ence. We amplified this with a tailored reading programme in science,
technology, business, and other key areas in order to find evidence of word
use in varied fields. Lastly we used the Internet as a research source.
(Introduction, p. xiii)
We noted (in Chapter 11) the COBUILD dictionary as the pioneer in the use
of computer corpora for providing the data from which the dictionary is com-
piled. The Bank of English, now amounting to in excess of 400 million words,
continues to supply data for Collins dictionaries, both for native speakers and
for learners. Oxford and Longman consult the British National Corpus, and Cam-
bridge the Cambridge Language Survey corpus.
A computer corpus consists of a collection of texts in electronic form, for
lexicographical purposes drawn from both written and spoken English and rep-
resentative of the vast range of text-types and registers found in language (see
Antoinette Renouf’s chapter on ‘Corpus Development’ in Sinclair 1987). Com-
puter corpora can be easily searched, so that all the occurrences of a word can be
identified, rather than just those that happen to be noticed by a reader. In that
sense, the data from computer corpora are more complete and more reliable
than from any other source; they also provide information about relative fre-
quency of occurrence, not only of words and homographs, but also of senses of
words. The usual output of a computer search is a concordance list, such as the
following for the word conductor (taken from the one million word Lancaster–
Oslo/Bergen Corpus of written English):
First and foremost, he or she must be able to write well and easily.
They must have analytical minds that seek to chop things up into parts . . .
Definers must have a broad, but not necessarily deep, fund of information.
. . . definers must have a feeling for the language, Sprachgefühl, a sense of
aptness of expression, an appreciation of nuance, style and idiom.
When a large number of people are contributing to a single work, one of the
major concerns is to maintain a consistency of writing and presentation. Dic-
tionary projects will, therefore, document their decisions about content and
style in a set of guidelines or a manual, so that any contributor or new member
of staff can be informed of the house rules for the particular publication. The
manual will specify not just conventions for the macro- and micro-structure of
the dictionary, but also points of detail, such as use of abbreviation and punctua-
tion within an entry.
Besides using a computer corpus for obtaining data, dictionaries are now
usually constructed using a computer database. A number of commercial prod-
ucts of this nature are available, but the larger publishers have their in-house
systems. Such a database allows several lexicographers or specialists to be work-
ing on entries at the same time, e.g. for pronunciation, etymology and so on;
Compiling dictionaries 171
and it allows each to see the work of the others. It also allows freelance lexico-
graphers to work at a location remote from the dictionary offices. It facilitates
the editorial and checking processes, and provides with relative ease the version
for eventual printing, as well as any electronic (CD-ROM or online) version.
Not only that, but once a dictionary database has been established, it can pro-
vide the material for dictionaries of other sizes (e.g. concise or pocket) and for
other user groups (e.g. children or school students). It also provides the basis for
easier updating and revising for the production of new editions.
The computer has changed the way dictionaries are compiled and produced,
but it has not done away with the need for skilled lexicographers to practise the
art, or craft, of constructing and writing dictionary entries. Like so many other
tasks, lexicography is computer-aided rather than computer-automated.
14 Criticising dictionaries
Anyone who has ever read (or written) a review of a particular dictionary
will know that generally agreed criteria and standards for the assessment of
quality and performance are still rare, if they can be said to exist at all.
This chapter discusses the business of dictionary criticism and proposes some ways
in which it may be undertaken and some guidelines for assessing dictionaries.
14.2 Method
Reviewing a dictionary is not like reviewing most other kinds of book publica-
tion. In the case of a normal book, the reviewer would expect to read the text
Criticising dictionaries 175
in its entirety, perhaps some sections of text more than once. The reviewer of a
dictionary would not expect to read every word of the text: first of all, diction-
aries are not meant to be read like that, and usually dictionaries contain too
much text to make it a feasible undertaking – NODE, for example, claims 4
million words of text, while CED4 estimates that it contains 3.6 million words.
Also at issue is who might be an appropriate person to review a dictionary. In
general, reviewers – of books, plays, films, music – are chosen because they are
considered knowledgeable or expert in the subject matter or the techniques of
whatever it is they are reviewing. We should expect the reviewers of dictionar-
ies to be knowledgeable in lexicography. This is not always so, especially in
newspaper and magazine reviews: being a user of a dictionary appears to be
sufficient qualification sometimes, even though the same publication would not
think of asking just any reader to review a novel or a book of poetry.
A reviewer, then, must be knowledgeable about lexicography, a point made
by Roger Steiner in his contribution to Dolezal et al. (1994), and they also need
a sound methodology for critically reviewing a dictionary. As with any review-
ing, the first step must be to develop familiarity with the work that is being
assessed. With dictionaries, this means, first of all, reading the often neglected
front-matter: the preface, the guide to using the dictionary, the list of staff and
consultants, and so on. This will usually give a preliminary view of the scope of
the dictionary, its intended users, and the types of lexical (and other) informa-
tion that are claimed to be included. Familiarisation will also include browsing
the main body of the dictionary and reading a variety of types of entry, as a
means of gaining an impression of the flavour of the particular dictionary under
review. Finally, some dictionaries have back-matter (appendices), which may
contain gratuitous additional information (e.g. counties of the UK and states of
the USA) or provide useful lexical information (e.g. affixes and combining
forms).
For a detailed assessment of the content of a dictionary, Robert Chapman
(1977) suggests that random sampling of entries should be used, such as ‘the
tenth main entry on every twentieth page’, in order to yield a manageable set of
entries (e.g. 50); and he proposes that each of these entries should be scrutinised
carefully for ‘accuracy, completeness, clearness, simplicity, and modernity’ (cri-
teria from McMillan 1949). Random sampling of entries ensures that a reviewer
does not look for a predetermined list of favourite items. However, a reviewer
needs to make sure that the resulting sample is representative, so that it contains
at least one member of each word class, that polysemy is well represented, and
that there is a spread across general and specialist lexemes. A random sample
may need to be supplemented by the reviewer’s checklist. Likewise, where a
dictionary has special additional features (e.g. synonym essays (LDEL2) or usage
notes (NODE, ECED, etc) ), these too need to be taken into account.
One of Chapman’s other suggestions is that the reviewing of dictionaries
should be undertaken by a team of reviewers. His conception of this seems to be
that each reviewer would be a specialist in some area of vocabulary and would
contribute an assessment of the treatment of the ‘definitions in their own fields’
(Chapman 1977: 158). Where team reviewing has been undertaken more recently
176 Criticising dictionaries
(e.g. the well organised and comprehensive Japanese reviews of COD8 (Higashi
et al. 1992) and of LDEL2 (Masuda et al. 1994) ), each member of the team has
taken a different aspect of linguistic description (pronunciation, definition, usage,
etymology, etc.) rather than vocabulary specialism, which is probably a more
sensible division of labour. Team reviews allow a more thorough treatment of
each aspect of a dictionary’s lexical description, both by enabling more extensive
sampling to be undertaken and by tapping into a reviewer’s specialist interest.
each word has at least one core meaning, to which a number of subsenses
may be attached . . . Core meanings represent typical, central uses of the
word in question in modern standard English . . . The core meaning is the
one that represents the most literal sense that the word has in ordinary
modern usage.
(p. ix)
These are testable statements. And they are tested by Sidney Landau in his
review of NODE (Landau 1999); he comes to the conclusion that ‘NODE’s
defining strategy is ambitious, and it does not always succeed . . . Nevertheless,
in most cases, the defining strategy does work.’ (p. 252)
Many shorter reviews take a dictionary’s view of itself at least as a starting
point for the evaluation, if not as the basis for the whole approach. Newspaper
and magazine reviews routinely depend on what the editors or publisher say
about their product, often with little attempt to test the sometimes exaggerated
claims. In that sense, there is a danger that a critique that relies solely on internal
criteria may be biased too much in favour of the dictionary, unless a radically
critical stance is taken to the claims that are made.
In using external criteria, a reviewer begins from a different standpoint. The
criteria are determined prior to the review; they arise from the accumulated
insights of the academic community (e.g. Hudson 1988; Ilson 1991). This does
Criticising dictionaries 177
not mean that they need be overly ‘academic’, since the community must take
account of the fact that dictionaries are as much reference works aimed at par-
ticular groups of users as they are linguistic descriptions of the lexical resources
of the language. Rundell (1998: 316) suggests two criteria for the evaluation of
improvements in the development of learners’ dictionaries:
There is a need, therefore, for two sets of external criteria for the evaluation of
dictionaries: one set relates to the reference function of dictionaries and the
user’s perspective, and is largely about presentation and accessibility; the other
relates to the recording function of dictionaries, and is largely about content.
Presentation and content overlap and interact with each other (e.g. the core
sense and subsense division in NODE), so this is to some extent a false dicho-
tomy. However, it will provide a useful framework for establishing criteria for
dictionary reviewing.
14.4 Presentation
How a dictionary presents its material has an important influence on the acces-
sibility of the information for its target users. In the preface to the first edition of
the COD (1911), the Fowler brothers commented that they had used ‘the
severest economy of expression – amounting to the adoption of telegraphese –
that readers can be expected to put up with’ (p. iv). How they determined
readers’ tolerance levels is not stated, but they are surely rather different from
those of today’s dictionary users. Aspects of presentation that should be consid-
ered by a dictionary reviewer include at least the following.
Page layout
The size of the page varies with the size of the dictionary (desk, concise, pocket
– see 3.2). It is usual to have two columns, though three may be found in some
dictionaries (e.g. NODE, ECED). A significant feature is the amount of white
space, determined by the size of the margins, the spacing between entries, the
inclusion of other material to break up the text (e.g. usage notes, diagrams,
illustrations). All these can have an effect on the appearance of the dictionary
page. Attractive page layout improves accessibility.
Length of entries
This is determined largely by the practice of ‘nesting’, where derivatives, com-
pounds, idioms and so on are included within a single entry under a root word.
Chambers uses nesting extensively, as does the COD up to the seventh edition
(1982). The use of separate headwords for compounds and derivatives, where
these are individually defined, creates shorter and more numerous entries, and
more white space, so enhancing page layout. Likewise the inclusion of abbre-
viations, affixes and combining forms as headwords (rather than in appendices)
creates more and shorter entries and aids accessibility.
Abbreviation
The use of abbreviations, like nesting, saves space, an important consideration
in dictionary making. The Fowlers noted this as a feature of COD1; their
assumption was that the users of the COD would understand and cope with a
high degree of abbreviation. That is no longer the case, and many recent dic-
tionaries (e.g. CED, NODE) now include the full forms of items such as word
class labels and names of languages in etymologies. Fewer abbreviations mean
greater accessibility.
Academic reviewers tend to concentrate on the content of dictionaries, but
presentation and accessibility should not be ignored, because they make a sig-
nificant contribution to enabling users to be successful in extracting information
from the dictionary.
14.5 Content
Hudson’s (1988: 310–12) ‘checklist of types of lexical fact’ would provide a
starting point for criteria of content, or alternatively Ilson’s (1991) more induc-
tively arrived at set of headings would serve. Such a set of criteria would en-
compass at least the following.
Range of vocabulary
Modern dictionaries are keen to claim that they have included the latest words
from areas where neologisms are common (e.g. business, information technol-
ogy, the environment, medicine), as well as coverage of other national varieties
of English (e.g. American, Australian). A reviewer would need to determine
whether, for its size and scope, the dictionary had adequate coverage of up-
Criticising dictionaries 179
to-date, technical, international and, if appropriate, regional lexis. Where a
dictionary includes such items, geographical and biographical entries would also
come under this heading.
Word formation
On the one hand, this relates to whether affixes and combining forms are treated
as headwords or gathered in an appendix, or not given any attention at all (cf.
Pr[ic 1999). On the other hand, it relates to the treatment of derived and com-
pound words, what the criteria are for separate headword status as against nested
run-on. Also relevant here is the treatment of noun/adjective pairs that are not
cognate, e.g. church – ecclesiastical, law – legal, mind – mental, lung – pulmonary. The
judgement to be made is whether the account of word formation enables a user
to ascertain the formal (morphological) relations between words.
Homographs
The usual basis for more than one headword for a single spelling is different
etymologies. In some dictionaries (e.g. LDEL) each word class that a lexeme
belongs to occasions a new headword. In COBUILD1 there is only one head-
word per spelling, whereas more recent monolingual learners’ dictionaries
(LDOCE3, CIDE) have multiple entries based on meaning. The criteria for
determining what is a headword have important consequences for lexical de-
scription as well as for accessibility.
Sense division
For words that have multiple meanings (senses), dictionaries do not always make
clear how the senses have been established (cf. Allen (1999) on ‘lumpers and
splitters’), or the order in which they have been arranged. A tendency is emerg-
ing (e.g. NODE, COD10) to pull back from the over-differentiation of senses
that has occurred in the past (CED, Chambers). The issue here relates both to the
adequacy of the lexical description and to how straightforward it is for the user
to find the desired sense.
Defining
This is usually seen as the crucial task of the lexicographer, and there are some
well established defining styles, notably the analytical (Kipfer 1984: 66–8).
However, these have been extended in recent years, especially in learners’ dic-
tionaries (e.g. with whole sentence definitions). Some dictionaries include a
certain amount of encyclopedic information in their definitions, especially for
words referring to flora and fauna. Not only does a reviewer need to assess the
adequacy of the definitions, but also whether they are stylistically appropriate
for the intended users.
180 Criticising dictionaries
Beyond denotation
Under this heading is included other aspects of a word’s lexical behaviour over
and above its denotation, such as its lexical relations (synonymy, antonymy,
hyponymy – as indicated systematically in COBUILD1), its typical colloca-
tions, and any shared connotations. Sometimes this information is incorporated
into definitions, but it is rarely handled systematically, though the ‘synonym
essays’ in LDEL2 and ECED constitute a rare exception. Yet this information
also contributes to an understanding of a word’s meaning.
Pronunciation
There are two issues here: the transcription system, which is almost universally
IPA now in British dictionaries, and the accent to be represented. While many
dictionaries now give alternative American pronunciations, no account is taken
of the fact, for example, that the majority of British speakers say /bgt/ rather
than /bkt/ and /græs/ rather than /grp:s/. Some native speaker dictionaries
(e.g. NODE) are now giving pronunciations only for words that are problem-
atical, but what may be designated a problematical pronunciation is a matter of
judgement (Allen 2000).
Grammar
Dictionaries have traditionally given word class (part-of-speech) labels, and for
verbs distinguished ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ uses; NODE acknowledges that
these may be opaque terms for modern users and substitutes ‘with obj’ and ‘no
obj’. Rarely have native speaker dictionaries given much more information
about grammar beyond this; CED, and now NODE, are exceptions. By con-
trast learners’ dictionaries have aimed for full coverage, which raises the ques-
tion about how grammatical information is represented for effective access.
A reviewer needs to evaluate how much information about the grammatical
operation of words is necessary for a dictionary to fulfil its recording function,
as against the need not to provide too much unnecessary information for
the intended users.
Usage
Dictionaries routinely label words or senses of words with ‘restrictive’ labels, to
indicate that the word or sense may be used only in a specific context. Such
labels may relate to: time (obsolete, archaic), dialect (North American, Austral-
ian English, Scottish), formality (informal, colloquial), evaluation (derogatory,
pejorative, euphemistic), status (slang, taboo), field or topic (Astronomy,
Music, Telecommunications). The extent to which dictionaries are consistent
in using their range of usage labels and how they apply them are matters for
the critic to evaluate. Some dictionaries include ‘usage notes’, especially to give
Criticising dictionaries 181
guidance on controversial areas, e.g. the preposition to be used after different, the
distinction between disinterested and uninterested. A critic may note how ‘con-
servative’ or ‘progressive’ a stance is taken by a dictionary on such issues.
Examples
All dictionaries give example sentences or phrases to illustrate word meaning,
grammar or usage. They are particularly numerous and prominent in learners’
dictionaries, where they are seen as playing a crucial role. A number of ques-
tions need to be asked by the critic, relating to: the extent of the use of exam-
ples, what role they are seen to play in exemplification, where the examples
come from (corpus or invented), and how consistently the dictionary’s policy
on examples is implemented.
Etymology
Since the etymological dictionaries of the eighteenth century, it has been cus-
tomary to include information about etymology in native speaker dictionaries,
though not in learners’ dictionaries (Chapter 10). It might be argued that such
information has no place in a dictionary of the contemporary language and
should be confined to ‘historical’ dictionaries (such as OED and SOED), though
Hudson (1988) includes etymology in his checklist of lexical facts. The amount
of etymological detail that general dictionaries include is variable; in some cases
it is just the language of immediate origin, or the etymology may be traced back
as far as possible, and perhaps with cognates in related languages. It is a matter of
critical evaluation whether the information in the dictionary under review is
appropriate to its size, purpose and intended users.
Special features
A dictionary will often seek to distinguish itself from its rivals by including a
special feature, e.g. the synonym essays and other boxed comments in LDEL2,
usage and other notes in NODE, word formation boxes in COD10, misspell-
ings in ECED, frequency information in COBUILD and LDOCE3. Some-
times these are a genuine enhancement of the information that the dictionary
gives; sometimes they are more of a marketing gimmick. Other special features
may be incorporated in the front-matter or the appendices, e.g. the essay on
English as a world language in CED, or the punctuation guide in COD8/9.
The question is whether they add to the lexical description and the coverage
and usefulness of the dictionary.
14.6 Perspective
Besides following an appropriate method and making judgements against an
explicit set of criteria, it is also possible for a reviewer to conduct dictionary
182 Criticising dictionaries
criticism from a number of different perspectives. The discussion so far has
more or less presupposed that dictionary criticism is undertaken from the per-
spective of the academic linguist or metalexicographer, applying lexicological
and lexicographical theory and insight to the task. Certainly, in the reviews that
have appeared in the International Journal of Lexicography, this has been, under-
standably, the predominant perspective adopted. But it has not always been
appropriate. For example, there was a review of OALD4 by Dwight Bolinger
(1990), which took the dictionary to task for not representing accurately some
very subtle syntactic peculiarities of verbs, which, had they been so treated,
would have probably baffled most users of the dictionary. Bolinger had, un-
characteristically, not appreciated the need for what Rundell has called ‘a more
utilitarian lexicography’ (Rundell 1998: 337), where there is a tradeoff between
the needs of the user and the meticulous accuracy of the lexical description.
An alternative perspective to that of the metalexicographer would be that, for
example, of the target user. The dictionary would be judged, by the method
and on the criteria stated, from the point of view of the needs, expectations,
prior knowledge and reference skills of the intended group of users. For an
example, see Jackson (1995) which makes a comparison of LDOCE2 and the
German learners’ dictionary, Langenscheidts Großwörterbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache.
A third possible perspective would be that of the language teacher – particu-
larly in respect of learners’ dictionaries – who would judge the dictionary from
the point of view of its suitability for the language teacher’s task and for the
students that they are teaching, whether in a first or a second language context.
Higashi et al. (1992) review COD8 from this perspective in the Japanese con-
text, perhaps inappropriately, since COD8 was not intended as a pedagogical
dictionary, although the COD seems to have been used widely for this purpose
in Japan.
The reviewer’s perspective can act as a focus for the attention to be paid in
the critique to different aspects of the dictionary’s presentation and content,
especially since it is difficult to treat every aspect in a single review.
14.7 Purpose
In conclusion, we may reflect on the purposes for which dictionary criticism is
carried out. Some reviews, especially in newspapers and magazines, have as
their main purpose to inform the public of the existence of a new edition of,
usually, a well-known dictionary; the content of the review then often reflects
the publisher’s press release or the dictionary’s blurb. Other dictionary reviews,
like any book review, are directed at an interested public (teachers, students,
crossword addicts) and have as their purpose to inform this audience of the
content of the dictionary and its fitness for their needs.
Reviews of dictionaries that appear in academic journals, such as the Inter-
national Journal of Lexicography, while informing the journal readers about the
existence and contents of the dictionary, are also intended in many instances to
make a contribution to academic lexicography. Such reviews are often more
Criticising dictionaries 183
thorough, pursue a more rigorous methodology, and draw on the accumulated
wisdom and expertise of the academic community of dictionary scholars. There
is one further purpose that academic reviews may have. Since their critique is
drawn from an expert knowledge of dictionaries, dictionary making and dic-
tionary use, they often propose ways in which dictionaries may be improved.
So, they are offering advice to working lexicographers and dictionary publish-
ers, and contribute towards the development of both practical and academic
lexicography.
If dictionary reviews are to fulfil this function, or indeed if they are to
make a serious contribution to the academic study of lexicography, then it is
important that dictionary criticism is conducted on a sound basis, with a clear
methodology and a set of explicit criteria.
One of the purposes of this book, and of this chapter in particular, is to give
you, the reader, the background to enable you to look at dictionaries, both
historical and contemporary, with a more informed insight. On the basis of
your study, you might attempt the review of a dictionary.
References
Index
accessibility 75–6, 78–82, 171, 177 electronic dictionaries 57–8, 59, 69–72,
acronym 13–14 77, 83, 159
affix 8, 12, 87 encyclopedia 21–2
Anglo-Saxon 10, 118, 119, 127 etymology 27, 36, 43, 55, 87, 117ff, 181
antonymy 17, 97–8, 132, 146–7 examples 26, 84, 130, 132, 136–7, 181
authority 40, 66
fixing 39–40, 44–5
Bailey, Nathaniel 37–9, 45, 166 formality 111–12
binomial 5, 86, 99 French 11, 20, 33, 39, 118, 120, 121
borrowing 11, 13, 20 frequency 140, 144
front matter 25, 76, 175
Cawdrey, Robert 33, 75
CD-ROM dictionaries 58, 69–72, glossary 31–2, 147
141–4, 159, 171–2 grammar 19, 22, 91, 95, 107, 108–9,
citations 29, 40, 44, 48, 59, 65, 88, 166; 130, 132, 135, 180
see also quotations Greek 11, 33, 118
collegiate dictionary 67
collocation 18, 27, 84, 91, 99, 132, 138, hard words 33–6, 75, 127
169 headword 25, 27–8, 86–8, 163, 178
combining form 9, 12, 121 homograph 2, 87–8, 179
completeness 36–9, 52, 59, 65, 75, 76, homonym 2, 26, 87
82, 162–3, 178–9 homophone 3
compound 5, 8, 9, 12, 25, 53, 86, 121 hyponymy 17, 98
computer corpus vii, 29, 131, 132, 140,
167 idiom 6, 99–100
concordance 29, 88, 131, 167–9 inflection 3, 8, 19, 26, 43, 87, 105–7
connotation 16, 96
conversion 13 Johnson, Samuel 39, 42–6, 62, 75, 161,
coverage see completeness 165, 166
defining vocabulary 130, 133 Latin 11, 20, 31, 32, 39, 118, 119, 120–2
definition 15, 26, 43, 55, 62–3, 65, learners’ dictionaries 24, 69, 83–5, 129ff,
93–6, 131–2, 133–5, 170, 179 153–8, 177
denotation 16, 96 lexeme 2, 3–5, 18, 25
derivative 8, 12–13, 25, 53, 56, lexical field 143, 146, 153
145 loanword 11, 14–15, 54, 106, 120–3
dialect 110–11
dictionary 21ff, 52, 67–8, 74–6 macrostructure 25, 78, 163
dictionary criticism 30, 173ff meaning 15, 19, 55, 76, 86ff
190 Index
meronymy 18, 98 reference 15–16
metalexicography 30, 173, 176, 182 Roget’s Thesaurus 149–50
microstructure 26, 79–82, 163 root 8, 12
morpheme 8, 19 run-on 25, 27
Murray, James 48–51, 102, 161, 165,
166 selection 42–3, 75
sense 15, 26, 55, 68, 88–93, 133, 179
nesting 68, 78, 178 sense relation 16–18, 96–9, 139, 180
slang 112
obsolete 113–14 spelling 18, 26, 43, 54, 61–2, 76, 82–3,
Old English 10, 117, 118, 119–20, 147, 101–2
151 synonymy 17, 69, 94–5, 97, 132, 146–7
Old Norse 10, 118, 119, 120 syntax 19, 27, 43, 84, 108–9, 131,
orthographic word 2 136–7
Oxford English Dictionary 23, 44, 47ff, 73,
82, 117, 124–6 thematic order 22, 69, 143–4, 145ff
thesaurus 150–5
part of speech see word class
Philological Society 47, 48 usage 19, 26, 109–15, 139, 180
phonological word 2 users 76–8, 132–9, 161–2, 182
phrasal lexeme 5
phrasal verb 6 vocabulary 10–11, 25, 48, 52–3, 127, 146
polysemy 15, 88
prefix 8, 13, 145 Webster, Noah 61–4, 166
pronunciation 18, 26, 43, 54, 102–5 word 1–2,
word class 6–7, 19, 26, 54, 88, 107–8
quotations 46, 49; see also citations word-form 4