Pylimitics

We pretty much take dictionaries for granted these days. But it hasn’t always been that way, and the process of creating dictionaries and dictionary entries is interesting enough that it’s been the subject of several books. The book that may have started the whole thing is The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester; it’s about the bizarre characters involved in the origin of the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s more about the characters than the dictionary, though, so Winchester followed it up with The Meaning of Everything, which is more focused on the creation of the dictionary itself. More recently published is Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper, who also writes dictionary entries.

When Word by Word was reviewed in The New Yorker, the review starts out with Stamper’s experience with revising the Mirriam-Webster entry for the word “take.” Short, common, widely-used words are the most difficult to define because they’re used in so many slightly-different ways. Revising a definition for a single word — the record-setting example in the book is “run” — can take months, and apparently if you’re a lexicographer (that is, a dictionary-writer), it can be a high point of your career when you track down a not-yet-recorded use case for a common word (or probably even for an uncommon word). 

One fascinating detail in Word by Word is that it makes the point that “Our brains aren’t wired to process language any faster now than generations ago,” but the Internet makes the process more visible. You can watch language evolve now, like inventing the microscope made it possible to see the microorganisms in a drop of water that were there the whole time.