Lexicography Today

DESCRIBE IT, BY GOVE!

Louis Fabian Bachrach Jr. Press photo of Philip B. Gove. 1961. 

Lexicographic modernity begins with Philip Babcock Gove (1902–1972), named chief editor at Merriam after William Allan Neilson’s death in 1946. Gove brought the latest thinking in linguistics to bear on practical lexicography, including one principle above all: that dictionaries should describe the language as it is used, not prescribe how it should be used. Gove wanted a dictionary that would be objective, scientific, and modern. Although this was conventional wisdom among linguistic scholars, Gove’s manner of pursuing the ideal—for example, suggesting that ain’t is Standard English—shocked the literary world, which still thought of dictionaries as “authorities.” 

Ex coll. & Karolyne Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 102 

THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL DICTIONARY EVER

Philip B. Gove, ed. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1961. 

With its quirky defining style, its omission of 250,000 obsolete words (an “incredible massacre”—Dwight Macdonald) to make room for 100,000 new ones (rock ’n’ roll, schlemiel, yakety-yak), its use of celebrities rather than literary greats for evidence, and especially its refusal to label usages “incorrect,” Webster’s Third created more controversy than any other dictionary in history. In retrospect, we can see the birth of the culture wars of the 1960s: incensed traditionalists called W3 a “beatnik” dictionary. A 1962 New Yorker cartoon featured a secretary at Merriam speaking to a guest: “Sorry. Dr. Gove ain’t in.” 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 102 

IT ALL COMPUTES NOW

Jess Stein & Laurence Urdang, eds. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Random House, 1966. 

Though it had been in the works for decades, the timing of The Random House Dictionary was propitious: the controversy surrounding Webster’s Third created a demand for a big dictionary with a more traditional balance between descriptivism and prescriptivism. Random House was marketed as the first dictionary to rely on computers for its editing and production. In the words of one commentator, “This could not fail to persuade the average reader in this technological age that the end product would be more accurate than something turned out by mere humans.” 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 103 

A USAGE PANEL PRESCRIBES

William Morris, ed. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. New York: American Heritage Pub. Co.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969. 

James Parton, founder of American Heritage magazine, was eager to get into the dictionary business, and the brouhaha over Webster’s Third gave him an opening. He hired a team to produce an alternative to Merriam. Where Gove had been permissive, American Heritage would prescribe copiously, backed by the authority of distinguished writers on its usage panel. The line lasted until a 5th edition in 2011, by which time American Heritage and Merriam-Webster had converged in approach. 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 104 

SOUPY TRANSPOSITION

E.B. White. Letter to Oliver Jensen, 1970. 

TLS. 

In October 1969, the editors of American Heritage sent E.B. White a copy, hoping for an endorsement. He politely declined, but his letter ended cryptically: “I must return to the kitchen now and continue with my preparation of vichyssoise. Yrs, EB White.” Only after some bemused head-scratching did the editors realize that, in their entry for vichyssoise, they had transposed the ss and the single s. The misspelling was corrected, naturally, in their second printing. 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 104 

DELAYED AUGMENTATION

R.W. Burchfield, ed. A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–1986. 

The moment the OED was completed in 1928, it was dated. A stopgap supplement was completed five years later, but the language kept evolving. When in 1957 Robert W. Burchfield was charged with bringing the big dictionary up to date, it was thought that he could finish by 1964. Yet the first of four volumes didn’t appear until 1972, and the last of the four took until 1986. A 7-year project turned into a 29-year one—not an uncommon occurrence in lexicography. Ultimately, the Supplement contained 69,000 entries and a half-million quotations. 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 105 

BURCHFIELD DIDN’T BOWDLERIZE

R. W. Burchfield. Letter to J. Johnson, president
of the Lions Club of Jersey, June 1975.

TLS.

This letter (only the first five lines of which are boring) is
self-explanatory. It is reflected neither in the Hardly Harmless
Drudgery book nor in the gallery guide because it was acquired
just before this exhibition opened. But given its irresistible content, and the Tom Stoppard connection, we couldn’t exclude it.

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner.

DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE

Autographed press photo of John Simpson & Edmund Weiner. Courtesy of Oxford University Press. 

For all its virtues, the newly supplemented OED could be a nuisance to use: words might appear in either or both of two separate alphabetical sequences. Burchfield was asked when the two would be merged. “Never,” he told Bryan Garner in July 1979. “It can’t be done.” But in the mid-1980s, OUP resolved to do the impossible. 

Two of Burchfield’s senior editors, John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, took over the editorship, and Timothy Benbow became project director on the “New OED Project.” 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 106 

WEIGHTIEST OF ALL

John Simpson & E.S.C. Weiner, eds. The Oxford English Dictionary. 20 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 2d ed. 

Though little new research was involved in merging the OED with its Supplement, it’s hard to conceive the scale of the task of producing this second edition. Typing the dictionary’s third of a billion characters took 120 person-years, and proofreading took 60 person-years more. Then the editors had to merge the sequences and ensure the results made sense. They somehow met their deadline. In March 1989, the massive dictionary appeared with entries for microprocessor and pixel, disco and psychedelic, New Left and Third World, LSD and UFO. The weight of the 20 volumes: 115 pounds. 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 106

MISPELLED WURDZ?

Advertisement for the Brother “Word-Spell” Electronic Dictionary, 1986. 

Computers, which were created in the 1940s to produce wartime ballistic firing tables, originally manipulated numbers. But since computational methods had helped to break enemy codes, Cold War resources were poured into computerizing dictionaries in the hope that computers could translate Soviet and East German scientific research. Language processing proved harder than number-crunching—much harder than anyone had expected. Only at the end of the 1970s did the speed, storage, and portability of computers make digital dictionaries a reality. 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD p. 422 

IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

LK-3000. Lexicon Corporation, 1978. 

The Craig M100 Translator and Information Center. Craig Corporation, 1979. 

Craig M100 pamphlet. 

First to market with a standalone electronic dictionary was Lexicon, followed by Craig Electronics. Users could buy bilingual dictionaries on electronic cartridges to translate between English and other languages. Both devices were slow. They had limited storage—today’s entry-level iPhone has 64 million times the memory. But they were successful on first appearance, generating buzz that the age of digital dictionaries had finally arrived. As the novelty wore off, though, the limitations became ever more obvious. The revolution would take another few decades. 

Ex coll. Jack Lynch. HHD no. 127 

FROM DISKS TO THE ETHER

Merriam-Webster Online. Entry for harmless. 

OED Online. Entry for drudge. 

All the major print dictionaries now have digital versions—Oxford and Merriam-Webster above all—and new born-digital dictionaries range from the raunchy and often hilarious Urban Dictionary to the surprisingly sound scholarship of Wiktionary. Dictionary.com combines the best of print dictionaries and the computer age, resurrecting the discontinued Random House Dictionary text and keeping it up to date. Electronic dictionaries have countless advantages over print books, but just one disadvantage: nobody wants to pay for them. Publishers are still hoping to figure out how to cover expenses, and maybe even make a profit, from these dictionaries. 

Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD nos. 129–31 

NO CAKEWALK FOR AUNT HAGAR’S CHILDREN 

Photograph of Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. 

Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of African American English. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, projected for 2025. Draft entries, with track changes, for Aunt Hagar’s children and cakewalk. 

Strange to say, but in the year 2024 there is still no comprehensive dictionary of one of the most distinctive and historically important varieties of English—that used in African American communities. (The pioneering Clarence Major focused only on slang.) The gap will soon be filled. In 2022 came the announcement of an in-progress Oxford Dictionary of African American English, overseen by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. Lexicography remains a vital enterprise, and there are still urgent tasks to do, more than half a millennium after the earliest printed dictionaries. 

Courtesy of Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences. HHD no. 132