Category Archives: dictionaries

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New Revision Schedule for the OED

The OED has made a major change to the way it issues online updates and revisions.

Historically OED updates have been released in sequential alphabetical blocks. The December 2007 update, for instance, ran from purpress to quit shilling. The March 2008 update operates on a different model. Rather than a alphabetical block, it consists of words with “significant lexical productivity” and words which will “benefit from immediate review within the dictionary.” In other words, it’s based on relevance, rather than alphabetical order.

Future updates, according to the OED, will alternate between the old and the new model, with the June 2008 update continuing the alphabetical revision from quits, and the September 2008 update switching back to relevance.

This strikes me an eminently sensible. It allow the OED to be (somewhat) timely, while also continuing the systematic alphabetical review of the entire dictionary. Way to go, OED.

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On OUPblog: Reading the OED, An Interview with Ammon Shea

The good people at OUPblog asked me to pinch hit for Ben Zimmer yesterday. The very thought of living up to a real live lexicographer sent me into a paroxysm of fear, so I punted, to mix bad sports metaphors, and sent them an interview I did recently with author Ammon Shea.

I had planned to run it in Errata, but Ammon’s most recent book is about reading the OED, all 21,730 pages of it, which he did last year. That heroic effort seemed ideally suited to an OUPblog post, so that’s where it went. I got the book itself the other day, and will post specifically about it closer to its August publication date.

This is the first of what I hope will become a regular feature: the Errata “Legends of Lexicography” interview series.

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Wordie Action Alert: Dictionary of American Regional English

The Dictionary of American Regional English is one of the great American scholarly achievements, all four volumes of the planned six volume work having earned endless praise.

I’m looking forward to writing at greater length about DARE one of these days. But poking around on their web site* this evening, I found something that might be of immediate interest, especially to the Americans in the house.

DARE is looking for citations. Anyone from North Carolina know what a “tally-lagger” is? Nantucketers familiar with the term “slatch,” or New Englanders with “sleighty?” The wanted list has a slew of great words on it, all beginning with S or T, all orphans looking for citations. I can’t provide a direct link, sadly, because their site uses frames, but you can find it by going to their main page and clicking on ‘QUERIES’ in the left-hand column.

This reminds me, Jesse Sheidlower still seems to be collecting sci-fi citations, judging from the latest entry on his Science Fiction Citation site, dated January 7, 2008.

If anyone knows of any other dictionaries with open calls for citations, please mention them in the comments.

* They’ve got a lot of interesting content on their site, but it would be wonderful if the dictionary itself was available online. If anyone from the Gates Foundation or the like is listening, this would be a wonderful way to spend some of your filthy lucre.

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Dictionary of Newfie English

Continuing our peripatetic exploration of odd online regional dictionaries, I present to you the Dictionary of Newfoundland English.

Originally published in 1982 by the University of Toronto Press, it was put online by Memorial University in 1999. The quality of both the site and the dictionary are excellent, and with over 5500 richly-cited entries it’s a goldmine of Canadiana. My only complaint is that the entries are framed, making it a headache to link directly to words (though there is a decent search engine).

Some gems I’d not previously heard: queak (the “gentle squeak of the young of small animals”) and tayscaun (“a small amount of anything).

Discovered via the intriguing REDEFiNE iT.

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Punctuational Outburst

A friend in academe sent me a paper on the evolution of language, from this month’s Science. I’m reposting it here, so you can read it for free. Academic journals are a racket.

Even free, I’m not sure you want to bother. “Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts” is boring and largely self-evident*. But mostly just boring: If real language was as dry and devoid of life as most academics make it, I’d give it up. I’d stop reading, stop talking, and just grunt.

The authors lead with an implied claim that American English emerged abruptly as a language when Noah Webster introduced his first dictionary. You could say that publishing a dictionary is a sign that a language has emerged–that dictionaries are symptoms of language. But they insinuate that Webster published his dictionary and, ipso facto, the American Language was created. I can’t imagine the authors actually believe this, but it’s how their forced analogy comes out.

They then present the thesis that, basically, language evolves more rapidly during times of social upheaval. Sure, but how did they discover this? It was “inferred from vocabulary data,” and in a footnote they say their “materials and methods are available on Science Online.” Their methods would have been more interesting to me than their conclusions, and I wish they’d included at least a precis of them in the paper*.

I have no idea of the actual merit of “Punctuational Bursts.” I am, clearly, totally ignorant when it comes to, among other things, linguistics, and in general the academic side of language and words. But wadding through academic writing like this makes me want to cry tears of vomit. Can anyone recommend an intro to or overview of linguistics that’s actually pleasant to read?

* UPDATE: Maybe I was a little gassy or something when I wrote this. I just reread the paper, and yes, it’s rather dry, but I think that’s almost a requirement to get published in a fancy journal like Science. And I wasn’t previously aware of some of the limits imposed by them. See the comments for a response from one of the authors, and yet another lame, arm-flapping mea culpa from yours truly. Note to self: work on impulse control.

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Living in a Dictionary

Steve just sent in a post from apartment therapy explaining how to make a dictionary wall (they credit DIY magazine with the idea). I like the idea of living inside a dictionary, but one problem: what if you want to look up a word that’s on the back side of one of the pages?

A less permanent way to achieve a modern version of the same: get a projector and bath your walls with an image of a word cloud. Put the projector on a lazy susan for a mirrorball effect.

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Pòg mo thoin

It’s been a while since we’ve had an installment of the Weird International Dictionary Series, so forthwith, I present MacBain’s Dictionary, aka An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, which was apparently “keyed in” by one Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle. To be specific, this is an html edition of a 1982 photo reprint of the 1911 2nd edition of a Gaelic dictionary originally published in 1896.

Somehow along the way all the words beginning with H, J, K, Q, V, W, X, Y and Z seem to have gone missing. Or perhaps Gaelic doesn’t have any such words.