Metalexicography / Lexicography

Learn about what dictionaries are/should be

How to evaluate them (and choose for yourself and your students)

How to design a dictionary

DO some dictionary making / revising projects

Selecting / Planning a Dictionary

1. A survey of types of dictionaries and other language reference

2. Number of languages 3. Variety of English 4. Primary language of the market 5. Form of presentation 6. Manner of financing 7. Age of users 8. Period of time covered 9. Size10. Scope of coverage by subject11. Limitations in the aspects of language covered

Reasons to Study Lexicography You love words It can help you evaluate dictionaries It might make you more sensitive to what

dictionaries have in them (and DON'T). It can make you a better USER of dictionaries too You will learn more about Reference Works in

general You may want to become a dictionary editor or

contributing editor You can help language learners with their

language learning needs Useful background for vocabulary learning,

teaching, or assessment

The Lexicographer's Aspiration

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Dictionary of the English Language,

Preface (1755)

Ambrose Bierce’s Definition LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the develop

ment of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue [sic]. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor—whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary”—although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation—sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion—the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

God said: “Let Spirit perish into Form,”And lexicographers arose, a swarm!Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,And catalogued each garment in a book.Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:“Give me my clothes and I’ll return,” they riseAnd scan the list, and say without compassion:“Excuse us—they are mostly out of fashion.”

Sigismund Smith