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Wording it right

What goes into the making of a dictionary? Who decides when a word can officially be incorporated into the English language? A look at the work of a lexicographer

Rack your brains, scratch your head, ask around, but your best bet, if you’re seeking out the definition for that particularly elusive word is to look it up in a dictionary, of course! Our faith in dictionaries to supply us with an answer every single time probably stems from childhood associations of seeing it around as a household essential.

But have you ever wondered: What goes into the making of a dictionary? Who decides when a word can officially be incorporated into the English language? No, really, there’s a word for people like them. What was it again? Oh yes, lexicographers.

Meet Michael Rundell, editor-in-chief of the Macmillan family of learner’s dictionaries and director of Lexicography MasterClass, a company that provides training in lexicography and lexical computing, and runs dictionary projects in various countries. Incidentally, he is also the co-author of the Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography (2008) along with leading bilingual lexicographer Sue Atkins. Lexicography is a highly specialised field, with an estimated 150 professionals in the UK alone.

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Michael’s association with lexicons goes back almost three decades when he got into the field by sheer chance. Commenting on this, he says: ‘Before I became a lexicographer I was a teacher of English to speakers of other languages, and worked in various places, including London and Spain. In 1980, I answered an advert from Longman Dictionaries, who were looking for experienced English teachers to get involved in a new dictionary project. I had no idea what to expect, but found that I enjoyed lexicography even more than teaching, and I’ve been working in this field ever since – first with Longman and more recently with Macmillan.’

Michael considers his work a whole different word game altogether. He explains: ‘If you work for one of the big historical dictionaries (like the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary), you spend a lot of time either tracing the history and development of words, or identifying new usages in various parts of the English-speaking world. But for people like me, whose goal is to produce pedagogical dictionaries that will help learners become more confident writers and speakers, the nature of our work is quite different.

‘For us, specialised or new vocabulary is not the central issue. Words like arthropod or endoskeleton may look difficult, but they are in fact very straightforward, for two reasons,’ he states, matter-of-factly. ‘First, the only people who need to know words like these are specialists in these fields. Secondly, words like this tend to have a single, very precise meaning; so they are easy to describe and learn.’

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In fact, the difficulty of the language lies elsewhere, he points out. ‘The really hard vocabulary is the central core of the language: the few thousand very frequent words which generally have several different meanings and often show a lot of complexity in the way they combine with other words.’ To drive his point home, he illustrates: ‘It’s not difficult to learn what remember means, but what is the difference between remember doing something and remember to do something? If a learner writes that someone did a bad crime, this isn’t exactly incorrect, but it’s not good, natural English. We are more likely to say that someone committed a serious crime. It’s the job of a good dictionary to provide enough information to enable learners to produce this kind of natural-sounding English.’

Michael himself is a learner of foreign languages, which helps him to appreciate the difficulty of language production, especially how hard it is to write well in a second language. Such exercise only provides him with more insight on how to simplify the average learner’s linguistic journey further.

With the advent of this e-age though, dictionary services are evolving for the better too. ‘Thanks to computer technology, it is now possible to collect massive databases of any language, called corpora. These are collections of novels, newspapers, academic textbooks, and all sorts of other texts. We can also use very smart software to extract relevant information from our corpus of texts,’ says Michael, listing out plus points. ‘The other big change is that dictionaries can now be used in electronic form, which means we are no longer limited by the space constraints of a printed book.’

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The decision to approve new words for the dictionary depends on two main criteria: frequency and range. ‘First, is the word frequently used now and secondly, is its use fairly widespread in the English-speaking world? This certainly applies to a word like credit crunch, which has become very widely used since the beginning of 2008. But other words may have a brief period of frequent use in one particular field, or one part of the English-speaking world, and then disappear again. To include a word in a dictionary, we need some evidence that it’s not just ephemeral,’ states Michael. In like manner, if current usage of online terminology keeps up, don’t be surprised if you see future dictionaries updated with words like ‘google’ and ‘facebook,’ passing off as actual English verbs.

Playing with words and languages can get pretty tricky and lexicographers try to make it as simple as possible. It’s common to try and make it sound right, rather than following hard-and-fast rules. So, the next time you’re uncertain about something, you could take a wild guess – or if it makes you feel any better, just look it up.

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