Why Are There So Many Dictionaries?

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hey, this is Linda Taylor from Houston, Texas. Hi, Linda. Welcome to the show.

So I listen to you so often, and I hear you refer to dictionaries all the time in your research and your answers, and I got to thinking, how many dictionaries are there in existence? You know, why are there so many English dictionaries, and what are the differences? So I thought I’d call Grant, and I saw in your biography that you’re a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.

That’s right, yeah.

So what better source to ask this question? What better source? And he’s a dictionary editor with lots of lexicographical experience.

Yes.

The Dictionary Society of North America has been a really important part of educating me about things linguistic and lexical. And a lot of what I bring to the show I learned from my colleagues in the Dictionary Society and the works that they’ve produced and the books that they’ve written.

So you’ve asked a really important question because a lot of people in their minds, they say, oh, they look it up in the dictionary. They talk about the dictionary as if there’s just one giant monolithic work. And there isn’t. Just like everything else in life, there are a lot of different ways to do dictionary work. And there’s different attitudes that you can have going in.

For example, there’s the mainstream dictionaries that might be used by students. Or there’s dictionaries that might be used by learners of English, the ESL dictionaries or the ELT dictionaries. And there’s specialty dictionaries, which are really kind of more about getting something on the record for the small number of people that will use it. Like, for example, I have a Sicilian dictionary, which was a self-published work. And there aren’t that many copies of it. And this guy felt that he needed to put the Sicilian language that he knew in print. And there we go.

So there’s all these different goals. But I should say, let’s kind of restrict it to talking about the mainstream dictionaries. They’re different because not only because of the attitudes that they have going in, but they’re different because they have different inclusion policies.

So, for example, a dictionary that’s a collegiate dictionary targeted at college students is really going to start thinking about what is being studied in college. They’re going to study physics and science and economics and agriculture and the humanities and that sort of stuff. And so let’s include a bunch of those words. Whereas a dictionary that’s a general purpose dictionary also has to throw in and say, oh, here’s the rare words used by Dickens and the rare words used by Jane Austen and the rare words used in Shakespeare and that sort of thing as well.

So we’re going to throw them in there because they once appeared in a really important work in English, and we need to have them just in case somebody wants to look them up.

Right, right.

So anyway, the short version is these dictionaries all have a goal, and you can’t treat dictionaries alike. Merriam-Webster isn’t like the Oxford dictionaries, and they’re not like the Cambridge dictionaries or the Collins dictionaries, the Macmillan dictionaries, the American Heritage dictionaries.

Because they have different approaches and emphases?

They have different approaches, yeah. They have different audiences or they come from a different perspective.

I never knew that. Interesting. I usually, and you’ll see this on our website, we have a reference section, which has a much longer version of what I’m saying here. If you just kind of look in the menu at the top of our website to resources and go down to reference works. You’ll see in there that I recommend, and I say this every time I talk about dictionaries at length, that you have two dictionaries, either on your computer or in your home.

Right.

Because you need to be able to compare entries side by side. Because the other thing about dictionaries is final as they look and as complete as they seem to be, they’re often very far behind. They can be 10, 20, 30 years behind. And even if they put a new edition out, that doesn’t mean that every entry got a refreshing new examination and new citations put in. Sometimes those entries are 100 years old and they’ve barely been touched.

Linda, do you own dictionaries yourself?

You know, Martha, I’ve gotten lazy and I use the computer. It’s just easy to just go online and pull up dictionary and put in a word. Or onelook.com, too. You can look at a lot of dictionaries that way.

Absolutely.

But I do subscribe to several word of the days. I’m just a word nerd.

Excellent.

You know, Linda, there’s nothing wrong with using online dictionaries. They’re not somehow inherently weaker or less than a paper dictionary. And in fact, if you go to Merriam-Webster’s site, they update their online content far more often than they do their paper content. And so you’re going to get fresh new stuff.

Right.

And Merriam-Webster and American Heritage both will do things online that they can’t do on paper because they have a ton more room. Oxford does the exact same thing, just a lot more space. So they can do things like put in more illustrations or more citations. Audio pronunciations. More audio pronunciations.

Exactly.

That’s another feature that I do like about the online dictionaries and pronunciation.

Linda, you’re one of us. Take care.

Thank you so much. It was just a pleasure talking to you both. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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