Grant and Martha talk more about the challenges dictionary editors face when trying to define numbers and colors. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Defining Numbers and Colors”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett. Martha, did you ever think that dictionaries also define numbers?
They do. I mean, we think about dictionaries being just for words, right?
Yeah.
But you can look up pretty much all the major numbers, not 302, but you can look up 100.
Right.
Or 1,000.
Right.
Like the big landmark numbers.
Right.
And they have definitions.
And it’s interesting to me how differently they can be defined in order to get to that point.
How do you describe a number in words?
It’s kind of a puzzle, right?
It would be a challenge.
Yeah.
One of the tricks that you can do is you can say that three is the sum of one and two.
Okay.
That’s fair, right?
Okay.
Or you could say that it’s one more than two.
Or you can say one less than four.
Right.
Some dictionaries will do all of these and also give the Arabic number.
So you would write the numeral three there next to it, right?
Okay.
It’s just really interesting.
When you get to the higher numbers, though, it’s more difficult because they kind of stick to this math.
And so you get really crazy stuff like the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the number a million as the product of a thousand and a thousand.
So a thousand times a thousand?
Why didn’t they just say it’s one more than 999?
Or it’s 10 to the sixth power, right?
And a trillion, the Collins dictionaries, for example, give it as one, the number represented as one followed by 12 zeros.
That’s one way to do it, right?
Yeah, that makes sense.
Or 10 to the power of 12 or a million million.
They’re doing the job of defining.
It’s as if the dictionary editor said, I haven’t defined this word, but I don’t know that they’ve added clarity.
Yeah.
It’s kind of a cursory.
Let’s just go up to up one level of conversation.
Putting numbers in the dictionary is kind of like obligatory.
You kind of have to do it.
But the question is, do people actually consult the dictionary for the definition of numbers?
I mean, maybe this doesn’t matter because you can just get away with putting anything.
Or you could do what the Merriam-Webster dictionaries do.
They just kind of bail on definitions altogether.
Do they?
In the unabridged, they just put a number table.
Oh, they do?
Yeah.
See, that kind of solves the problem, right?
Well, that’s because they’re so busy defining colors.
I’m looking at one of my favorite entries in Merriam-Webster, which is for geranium lake.
Do tell.
Which is a color.
Geranium Lake is a vivid red that is lighter and slightly yellower and stronger than apple red,
Yellower, lighter and stronger than carmine, and bluer, lighter and stronger than scarlet,
Also called spark.
I mean, think about it.
Trying to define numbers and colors, it’s crazy.
Yeah, the Collins Dictionaries, when they define the color red, it says,
Any of a group of colors, such as that of a ripe tomato or fresh blood,
That lie at one end of the visible spectrum next to orange
And are perceived by the eye when light in the approximate wavelength range
740 to 620 nanometers falls on the retina.
Oh, my gosh.
Clarity, not added.
Oh, my gosh.
Opacity is like at maximum levels there.
But let’s just say comparing it to the ripe tomato or fresh blood does the job.
It does the job.
Right.
We know what blood is because we’ve experienced these things as human beings.
Yeah.
I think the moral of this story is hug a dictionary editor today.
Share your finds in the dictionary or your wonderful finds in the English language with us.
You can send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.
Leave them on our Facebook page under the username Wayword Radio.
And speaking of numbers, here’s ours.
