Browse Items (21 total)

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

Born in New Zealand in 1923, Burchfield came to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He became editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1957. He later wrote several popular books, including The English Language (1985)…

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…

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.…

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…