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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,…

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…

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…

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…

The undisputed master of slang today is Jonathon Green, whose magnum opus, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, was 17 years in the making. It contains 110,000 headwords supported by 415,000 quotations spread out over 6,200 pages. It’s the fullest scholarly…

Although British regionalisms were documented beginning in the Victorian era, America had to wait until the late 20th century. Frederic G. Cassidy, a Jamaican-born linguist, sent 500 lexicographic allies armed with questionnaires and tape recorders…

If A Feminist Dictionary doesn’t look much like other dictionaries, that’s because it’s an avowed polemic rather than a work of practical lexicography. Professors Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler produced what one archivist called “sort of a cross…

Computer enthusiasts have long constituted a subculture, but nobody thought to record their distinctive language until Raphael Finkel, a doctoral student, began collecting it in a text file nicknamed “The Jargon File.” As he shared it with friends…

Publishing a candid “dictionary of homophile cant” in 1972 took courage. Just three years since the Stonewall uprising, homosexuality was still classed as “sexual deviation” and was illegal in 46 of the 50 states. But Bruce Rodgers was convinced that…

Linguists began to take African American speech seriously in the early 20th century, but it took until 1970 to get a book-length dictionary. Poet and novelist Clarence Major took many words from jazz (offbeat). Some are joyous (hot dog!) and some…