Mountweazels

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matthew calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Matthew.

Hi. So my question really has less to do with any one specific word and more to do with how words are defined in print in dictionaries.

Because obviously a word like dog has, you know, we have a cultural understanding of what a dog is.

And the dictionary definitions of those words are going to have to mirror each other very substantially.

And my question really had to do with how that affects how dictionarians and people who deal with words deal with the prospect of plagiarism and copyright infringement in coming up with these definitions.

Well, you know, I don’t know if you know this, Matthew, but that’s my background.

I’m a dictionary editor specializing in slang and new words.

Let me just kind of restate your question.

What you’re asking is how do they avoid plagiarizing each other, right?

Because the odds are pretty good that their entries are going to sound very much alike.

Exactly.

Right.

It’s messy.

I will say this.

There are cases of known plagiarism between dictionaries, and it used to be far more common.

Theft of whole dictionaries used to be fairly ordinary in the 1700s and even well into the 1800s.

The entire dictionary, not just the entry for dog?

Yeah, they would steal whole sections of it, and they’d change the front a little bit and some other stuff or do very light revisions.

Because it’s expensive and always has been to make a dictionary.

But that’s just one kind of plagiarism.

It doesn’t really answer your question because you’re asking about independent derivation of entries.

So the entry for dog, and I won’t read the dictionary entries that I could call up right now.

First, you have to look at the whole entry.

Is the whole entry identical?

If it is, then you’ve got a problem.

If it’s just the definition, every lexicographer who works in any language would tell you,

Because of the way that good lexicography is practiced,

You are going to be constrained into a certain kind of language, a certain kind of brevity.

And if it’s the same as somebody else’s dictionary, nobody really is going to have a problem with that

Unless every single one of your entries in your dictionary, or most of them, are identical.

Now, case by case, it’s totally fine. Nobody’s going to bother you for that.

So independent…

Okay.

Yeah, it’s going to be fine.

But what’s really interesting, and I don’t know if you know this,

But a lot of your modern dictionaries share common roots.

They go back, for example, to the Merriam-Webster’s unabridged dictionaries

That are now in the public domain.

And a lot of times they have entries for these common words

That are basically unchanged for more than 100 years.

And so you can look at Australian, Canadian, British, and American dictionaries

And see identical entries except for the pronunciation for certain entries.

So do lexicographers for different companies who write dictionaries collaborate at all these days?

Because I would imagine that certain, you know, there are even further uses for coming up with some common definitions for new words that might arise.

They don’t collaborate, but they use identical methods, and they do what most industries do.

They do a competitive review.

So if I work for publisher A and publisher B comes out with a dictionary that’s similar to the one that I’m working on,

I will go through their dictionary page by page and find their new entries if they don’t already point them out to me

And figure out which of those entries are good and that I need to do my own research on,

And I will completely do all my own research.

I will not steal from them, and I will reprove and redefine based upon their inclusion of that word.

And you’ll find sometimes that you need all their words.

Sometimes you’ll find that you need three-quarters of their words.

That said, there are a few lexicographers in recent years, and I won’t get too specific, who’ve gotten into trouble.

And there was one person who was fired for stealing from a dictionary.

She was caught by what we call a ghost word or a mount weasel.

That’s with a Z.

It’s a fake word included in the dictionary to trap people who are stealing your content.

And she just stole the stuff, supposedly, and was caught and fired.

And, you know, it’s not done these days.

Have you heard of those? Mount weasels?

No, that’s totally new to me.

It’s just really interesting that dictionaries would include fake words that no one but they are going to know are actually fake.

Sometimes they come out, look for a New Yorker article about Mount weasels.

That’s M-O-U-N-T-W-E-A-Z-E-L-S.

And just look for New Yorker Mount weasels.

And you’ll come across an article by Henry Alford where he talks about this and about how one of these words,

He figured out one of these words for the new Oxford American Dictionary.

Awesome.

Well, I never knew that the world of dictionaries was so cloak and dagger and smoke and mirrors.

Well, it’s a small, insular world.

It’s kind of like the Roman Senate.

There’s poison and knife fights.

Who knew?

Well, you have brought out some really interesting information that I didn’t know about,

So we appreciate your calling.

Well, thank you so much for taking my call.

Yeah, our pleasure, Matthew.

Give us a call another time, all right?

Will do.

Y’all have a good day.

You too. Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

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