Why Do Some People Get Bios in Dictionaries?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sigrin Newell from Albany, New York.

Hi, Sigrin. Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Hello, Grant.

Hey.

I was looking at the American Heritage Dictionary,

And my eye was caught by the picture of a Korean woman

Who was the first female pole vaulter in the Olympics.

Why should she, of all people, be in the dictionary?

And that made me wonder about people in dictionaries,

And I went browsing around,

And it’s self-evident why famous people are there,

But for others it’s not so clear.

Obscure French politicians, movie stars from the 1930s,

And the Prime Minister of Australia from 1968.

So my question is, who decides how people are entered in the dictionary?

And how do the editors decide that someone is famous enough

To warrant having their picture there?

And thirdly, if they want to put new people in,

Who decides how they get to take somebody out?

Wow, great questions.

And a question for you, Sigrun.

This was a photograph of the Korean pole balter?

That one was.

It was so long ago, now I can’t go back and find her without looking at every page of the dictionary.

But, yeah, she had her picture there as well as just her name, which is what surprised me.

They’re really good about having lots of pictures.

My favorite is the contortionist.

Right.

They’ve had good pictures in different editions of that.

Yeah, yeah.

I can answer this question with a little bit of authority because I happen to know the man in charge of American Heritage Dictionaries.

His name is Steve Klein-Edler.

And I have asked him this question about what are called encyclopedic entries.

That’s how they refer to them in the business.

So you have the dictionary content, and then anything that looks like it belongs in an encyclopedia,

Say something that’s like a fully elaborated description of a country,

Including population and date founded and da-da-da, that’s more encyclopedic.

And then the entries you’re talking about, the bios, definitely encyclopedic.

And American heritage, like all the other dictionaries published in English and maybe probably in other languages, have over the years and over the editions reduced the amount of encyclopedic content.

They’ve cut way back on it.

Partly it’s due to encyclopedias doing the job better, but partly now that the Internet has been a thing in our lives for decades, it’s because the Internet is doing a job that the dictionary doesn’t have to bother to keep up with, if that makes sense.

Dictionaries are slow-moving ships.

They update infrequently.

And so they can quickly look dated, like you said,

When they show some leader of a country from 1968

Who hasn’t been in power for 50 years.

That’s because they haven’t edited the dictionary.

So that said, in general, there’s less encyclopedic content,

Including in American Heritage.

If you compare the fourth edition to the fifth edition,

Which is the current one, there are fewer entries.

Things were taken out.

Now, who does that?

Obviously, it’s the editors and the lexicographers and their internal policies.

I know that when I worked for Oxford University Press, and I also worked for Cambridge University Press making dictionaries and a couple other companies making dictionaries,

We had rules in-house where we decide what to include and what not to include.

But they were often modified according to the needs of the moment.

For example, in the new Oxford American Dictionary, we wanted to include a lot of maps.

And so we had all the maps made.

But as we went to press, we realized that we needed to cut pages, and it’s very easy to cut out images in order to make the whole dictionary fit into the print size that you want.

So that’s part of it.

Part of it is just practical needs.

What is going to work in print?

What’s going to fit?

And images and encyclopedic content are very easy to cut.

So I’m picturing a committee.

Like I’ll raise you a Korean pole vaulter.

How does that work?

Well, part of you also, you try to be very sensitive to the zeitgeist.

What is the culture feeling and thinking and has been thinking for the last few years?

They’re very conservative instruments, dictionaries.

And I don’t mean politically conservative.

I mean in the more environmental sense of conservative, where they try to keep and maintain and preserve.

So they’re very careful about including and excluding things.

And so there’s not a lot of horse trading.

It usually makes a lot of sense.

You might have a Korean pole vaulter.

Was she the first at something?

Was she spectacular?

Was her record, you know, she’d break a record that had been in place for 80 years.

Does she go very well with other things on the page, for example?

It just so happens this page also has, you know, some sport or her country or the city that she was born in.

And then the way you get this really nice synchronicity of things kind of working together on a page.

And is it a good picture?

Just like a newspaper will publish pictures just because sometimes because they’re amazing and not particularly because they’re newsworthy.

Sounds like hanging paintings in a gallery so they have a dialogue with each other.

Yeah, it’s a little bit of having a dialogue.

That said, dictionaries do make mistakes,

And sometimes stuff lingers in a dictionary that should have been taken out a long time ago.

It makes me want to go back to the dictionary and go through it again

And start looking more carefully at all those pictures and all those entries just of the people.

Anyway, so that’s the short version.

If you want to learn more about how dictionaries are made in general,

On the reference book section of our website, we have a list of books about lexicography,

And they should be able to answer some of these questions.

Great. Thank you.

Sigmund, good to talk with you.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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