The Definition of a Dictionary Merriam-Webster is revising its most authoritative tome for the digital age. But in an era of twerking and trolling, what should a dictionary look like? (And do we even need one?) By Stefan Fatsis slate/articles/life/culturebox/2015/01/merriam_webster_dictionary_what_should_an_online_dictionary_look_like.html By the high-gloss, high-tech standards of 21st-century corporate life, the headquarters of America’s premier dictionary publisher is an unusual place. Merriam-Webster Inc. is housed in a two-story brick building in Springfield, Massachusetts, that, if not for the bas-relief dictionary and company name above the front door, could pass for an old elementary school. There’s a broad central staircase, and dowdy conference rooms, linoleum floors, and creaky wooden doors, even some hospital-green and cafeteria-yellow walls. The decor is a mishmash of stately oak desks from the 1940s and gray cubicles from the 1990s. Stefan Fatsis is the author of Word Freak and A Few Seconds of Panic, a regular guest on NPRs All Things Considered, and a panelist on Hang Up and Listen. On the first floor are business offices and company artifacts. A glass case down an echoey hallway contains Noah Webster’s first lexicographic effort, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1806, and his 1828 follow-up, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which, with 70,000 entries, rivaled Samuel Johnson’s great British book. The second floor is home to about 40 definers, etymologists, pronouncers, daters, and typists, plus the most comprehensive extant repository of the history of American English: 16 million 3-by-5-inch slips of paper, known as citations, crammed into alphabetized drawers in rows of chest-high, metal filing cabinets. “The essential value of the company is inside those drawers,” says Peter Sokolowski, a Merriam editor. “It’s irreplaceable.” The citation files are supposed to be fireproof. But with no sprinkler system installed—an accidental soaking would cause serious damage—no one wants to find out if they really are. Merriam brothers George, top, and Charles Merriam. Courtesy of © Merriam-Webster Inc. Merriam’s president and publisher, John M. Morse, admits that the company should probably move to a more modern space. But the 75-year-old building was paid off long ago—cost of construction: $200,000—and running a reference publisher in western Massachusetts is a lot cheaper than doing so in Boston or New York. Employees, whose work tends to the monastic, also like the bucolic region, if not struggling downtown Springfield. In any case, it’s fitting that this iconic American brand, created by one of the nation’s first political thinkers and intellectual entrepreneurs, remains loyal to its past. While Noah Webster was a Connecticut man, the company has been in Springfield since brothers George and Charles Merriam acquired the rights to the dictionary after Webster died in 1843. Now Merriam-Webster is pushing into the future by making an audacious nod to its past. More than half a century after it was published, the company’s landmark book—Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, known in lexicographic circles as Webster’s Third, W3, the Unabridged, or the Third—is getting an overhaul. The Third is a behemoth—4 inches thick, 13½ pounds, 2,700 pages—that falls like a crashing wave when opened. A fourth edition, by contrast, might never exist as a physical object. This latest revision, a project Merriam-Webster hopes will secure its dominance in the tenuous business of commercial lexicography if not ensure its future survival, is happening entirely online. On its face, this might sound like a terrible plan. Merriam has tasked the majority of its employees with rewriting a book that likely won’t generate revenue the old-fashioned way, through hardcover sales. The project involves the subscription-only Unabridged site, not Merriam’s free online dictionary, which is based on its smaller desktop book, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. So there’s no guarantee it will find enough customers willing to pay $29.95 a year to turn a profit. Plus, the work could take decades to complete. By the time the Third gets close to being a Fourth, it’s not clear how people will use a dictionary, or even what a dictionary will be. A dictionary isn’t primarily a book anymore. It’s a database. But while the Internet has upended a publishing model that dates to Robert Cawdrey’s 1604 A Table Alphabeticall, it also has strengthened the feeling among lexicographers that the public cares deeply about language—and that there is still a place for the dictionary. For Merriam specifically, the potential of digital lexicography, a belief that people crave guidance and trust authority, and its own historical place in American letters have combined to convince it of the wisdom of rolling the dice and redoing the Third. “Creating a new Unabridged Dictionary gives us the opportunity to revisit the biggest questions of all,” Morse says. “What is it that ought to be said and shown about the words in the dictionary? What should we talk about when we talk about words? The Unabridged provides the platform to present the fullest explication of words and hence the opportunity to say what it is that ought to be said. And the answer shifts from generation to generation.” That might come off as highfalutin, and possibly self-serving. Merriam isn’t the first dictionary company to update its signature reference work or to go digital-only with it, and the Unabridged isn’t even close to the biggest lexicographic resource out there; Oxford University Press has been issuing quarterly online revisions of its mammoth Oxford English Dictionary since 2000. But while the OED has a handful of lexicographers writing definitions in New York, and the legendary tome is revered for its comprehensive historical approach—the most recent printed edition ran to 20 volumes—it’s ultimately an English-as-in-England work. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged is distinctly American, the seminal sourcebook not only for English as it is written and spoken in the United States but also for the history of lexicography in the United States. “Language,” Noah Webster wrote in the preface to his American Dictionary, “is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language.” Almost 200 years later, the descendant of the company Webster founded is the last fully staffed American dictionary-maker standing. And its unabridged dictionary is its crown jewel. “Within certain boundaries, we get to reinvent what the dictionary is,” Morse says. “The opportunity does not come often, so it’s vitally important that we seize it.” 150106_CB_MW_pagebreak “I was working on twerk,” Emily Brewster whispers in her tidy cubicle on the Merriam building’s second floor. A warren of desks stacked with papers and shelves groaning with books, the Editorial Floor, as it is officially known, could pass for a newspaper newsroom. But one thing is missing: noise. Into the 1990s, talking was all but banned and staffers communicated by writing on pink citation slips, even to make lunch plans. Silence still reigns; like most of her editorial colleagues, Brewster doesn’t have a phone on her desk. Merriam-Webster editorial department in the 1950s The editorial office at Merriam-Webster in the 1950s. Courtesy of © Merriam-Webster Inc. Now, on this summer afternoon, the Merriam associate editor is moving on to upcycle, specifically the noun form: “an upward trend in business activity.” That’s the quick, first-draft definition she’s typed into an Excel spreadsheet titled New Words, a document in which Merriam staffers suggest and track possible dictionary additions. Brewster is collecting examples of nounal usage, from Merriam’s electronic citation files and from the database Nexis. (The electronic system was created in 1983 but paper citations, or “cits,” were also generated until 2009.) Another definer has noted a verb form, “to recycle materials into a product of higher intrinsic value.” Brewster copies and pastes quotations that use the word, plus the source and date, into a Microsoft Word document. There’s a 1981 Associated Press story about airline stocks, a 1984 Business Wire release about insurance brokers, a 1997 Houston Chronicle piece on mortgage rates. As she tinkers with the definition, I ask whether she wants to avoid upward in the definiens (aka the definition) because the definiendum (the expression being defined) is itself an up word. “What I want is the most easily comprehended wording,” she says. “It is less than ideal to use upward in a word like upcycle. But upward trend is a phrase that people really understand and isn’t overly complicated.” I suggest “a period of increased economic activity.” She politely ignores me. Then I point out that the upcycle examples she has culled all refer to financial products like stocks and insurance, indicating that it might be a narrow Wall Street term rather than a broad economic one. “How about ‘an upward trend in the value of financial instruments’?” I ask. “That’s very good,” Brewster replies. “Can I use that? We can put your initials in the dictionary. Which nobody gets.” (Look out Noah, here I come.) 1. Scotland’s vote on whether to remain part of the United Kingdom triggered lookups for which word?
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 12:52:44 +0000
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