Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

Preface

Language is one of the few common experiences humanity has. Not all of us can walk; not all of us can sing; not all of us like pickles. But we all have an inborn desire to communicate why we can’t walk or sing or stomach pickles. To do that, we use our language, a vast index of words and their meanings we’ve acquired, like linguistic hoarders, throughout our lives. We eventually come to a place where we can look another person in the eye and say, or write, or sign, I don’t do pickles.

The problem comes when the other person responds, What do you mean by ‘do,’ exactly?

What do you mean? It’s probable that humanity has been defining in one way or another since we first showed up on the scene. We see it in children today as they acquire their native language: it begins with someone’s explaining the universe around them to a rubbery blob of drooling baby, then progresses to that blob understanding the connection between the sound coming out of Mama’s or Papa’s mouth—cup—and the thing Mama or Papa is pointing to. Watching the connection happen is like watching nuclear fission in miniature: there is a flash behind the eyes, a bunch of synapses all firing at once, and then a lot of frantic pointing and data collection. The baby points; an obliging adult responds with the word that represents that object. And so we begin to define.

As we grow, we grind words into finer grist. We learn to pair the word cat with meow; we learn that lions and leopards are also called cats, though they have as much in common with your long-haired Persian house cat as a teddy bear has with a grizzly bear. We set up a little mental index card that lists all the things that come to mind when someone says the word cat, and then when we learn that in parts of Ireland bad weather is called cat, our eyes widen and we start stapling little slips of addenda to that card.

At heart, we are always looking for that one statement that captures the ineffable, universal catness represented by the word cat, the thing that encompasses the lion cat and the domestic-lazybones cat and the bad weather in Ireland, too. And so we turn to the one place where that statement is most likely to be found: the dictionary.

We read the definitions given there with little thought about how they actually make it onto the page. Yet every part of a dictionary definition is crafted by a person sitting in an office, their*1 eyes squeezed shut as they consider how best to describe, concisely and accurately, that weather meaning of the word cat. These people expend enormous amounts of mental energy, day in and day out, to find just the right words to describe ineffable, wringing every word out of their sodden brains in the hopes that the perfect words will drip to the desk. They must ignore the puddle of useless words accumulating around their feet and seeping into their shoes.

In the process of learning how to write a dictionary, lexicographers must face the Escher-esque logic of English and its speakers. What appears to be a straightforward word ends up being a linguistic fun house of doors that open into air and staircases that lead to nowhere. People’s deeply held convictions about language catch at your ankles; your own prejudices are the millstone around your neck. You toil onward with steady plodding, losing yourself to everything but the goal of capturing and documenting this language. Up is down,*2 bad is good,*3 and the smallest words will be your downfall. You’d rather do nothing else.

We approach this raucous language the same way we approach our dictionary: word by word.

*1 Throughout this book, I will be using the singular their in place of the gender-neutral his or the awkward his or her when the gender of the referent isn’t known. I know some people think this is controversial, but this usage goes back to the fourteenth century. Better writers than I have used the singular their or they, and the language has not yet fallen all to hell.

*2 up adv…7 b (1) : to a state of completeness or finality (MWU; see the bibliography for more details)

down adv…3 d : to completion (MWU)

*3 bad adj…10 slang a : GOOD, GREAT (MWC11)

Hrafnkell

On Falling in Love

We are in an uncomfortably small conference room. It is a cool June day, and though I am sitting stock-still on a corporate chair in heavy air-conditioning, I am sweating heavily through my dress. This is what I do in job interviews.

A month earlier, I had applied for a position at Merriam-Webster, America’s oldest dictionary company. The posting was for an editorial assistant, a bottom-of-the-barrel position, but I lit up like a penny arcade when I saw that the primary duty would be to write and edit English dictionaries. I cobbled together a résumé; I was invited to interview. I found the best interview outfit I could and applied extra antiperspirant (to no avail).

Steve Perrault, the man who sat opposite me, was (and still is) the director of defining at Merriam-Webster and the person I hoped would be my boss. He was very tall and very quiet, a sloucher like me, and seemed almost as shyly awkward as I was, even while he gave me a tour of the modest, nearly silent editorial floor. Apparently, neither of us enjoyed job interviews. I, however, was the only one perspiring lavishly.

So tell me, he ventured, why you are interested in lexicography.

I took a deep breath and clamped my jaw shut so I did not start blabbing. This was a complicated answer.

—

I grew up the eldest, book-loving child of a blue-collar family that was not particularly literary. According to the hagiography, I started reading at three, rattling off the names of road signs on car trips and pulling salad-dressing bottles out of the fridge to roll their tangy names around on my tongue: Blue Chee-see, Eye-tal-eye-un, Thouse-and Eyes-land. My parents cooed over my precociousness but thought little of it.

I chawed my way through board books, hoarded catalogs, decimated the two monthly magazines we subscribed to (National Geographic and Reader’s Digest) by reading them over and over until they fell into tatters. One day my father came home from his job at the local power plant, exhausted, and dropped down onto the couch next to me. He stretched, groaning, and plopped his hard hat on my head. Whatcha reading, kiddo? I held the book up for him to see: Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, a book from my mother’s nursing days of yore. I’m reading about scleroderma, I told him. It’s a disease that affects skin. I was about nine years old.

When I turned sixteen, I discovered more adult delights: Austen, Dickens, Malory, Stoker, a handful of Brontës. I’d sneak them into my room and read until I couldn’t see straight.

It wasn’t story (good or bad) that pulled me in; it was English itself, the way it felt in my braces-caged mouth and rattled around my adolescent head. As I grew older, words became choice weapons: What else does a dopey, short, socially awkward teenage girl have? I was a capital-n Nerd and treated accordingly. Never give them the dignity of a response was the advice of my grandmother, echoed by my mother’s terser Just ignore them. But why play dumb when I could outsmart them, if only for my own satisfaction? I snuck our old bargain-bin Roget’s Thesaurus from the bookshelf and tucked it under my shirt, next to my heart, before scurrying off to my room with it. Troglodyte, I’d mutter when one of the obnoxious guys in the hall would make a rude comment about another girl’s body. Cacafuego, I seethed when a classmate would brag about the raging kegger the previous weekend. Other teens settled for brownnoser; I put my heart into it with pathetic, lickspittling ass.

But lexophile that I was, I never considered spending a career on words. I was a practical blue-collar girl. Words were a hobby: they were not going to make me a comfortable living. Or rather, I wasn’t going to squander a college education—something no one else in my family had—just to lock myself in a different room a few thousand miles away and read for fourteen hours a day (though I felt wobbly with infatuation at the very idea). I went off to college with every intention of becoming a doctor. Medicine was a safe profession, and I would certainly have plenty of time to read when I had made it as a neurosurgeon.*1

Fortunately for my future patients, I didn’t survive organic chemistry—a course that exists solely to weed slobs like me out of the doctoring pool. I wandered into my sophomore year of college rudderless, a handful of humanities classes on my schedule. One of the women in my dorm quizzed me about my classes over Raisin Bran. Latin, I droned, philosophy of religion, a colloq on medieval Icelandic family sagas—

Hold up, she said. "Medieval Icelandic family sagas. Medieval Icelandic family sagas. She put her spoon down. I’m going to repeat this to you one more time so you can hear how insane that sounds: medieval Icelandic family sagas."

It did sound insane, but it sounded far more interesting than organic chemistry. If my sojourn into premed taught me anything, it was that numbers and I didn’t get along. Okay, fine, she said, resuming breakfast, it’s your college debt.

—

T he medieval Icelandic family sagas are a collection of stories about the earliest Norse settlers of Iceland, and while a good number of them are based in historically verifiable events, they nonetheless sound like daytime soaps as written by Ingmar Bergman. Families hold grudges for centuries, men murder for political advantage, women connive to use their husbands or fathers to bring glory to the family name, people marry and divorce and remarry, and their spouses all die under mysterious circumstances. There are also zombies and characters named Thorgrim Cod-Biter and Ketil Flat-Nose. If there was any cure for my failed premed year, this course was it.

But the thing that hooked me was the class during which my professor (who, with his neatly trimmed red beard and Oxbridge manner, would no doubt have been called Craig the Tweedy in one of the sagas) took us through the pronunciation of the Old Norse names.

We had just begun reading a saga whose main character is named Hrafnkell. I, like the rest of my classmates, assumed this unfortunate jumble of letters was pronounced \huh-RAW-funk-ul\ or \RAW-funk-ell\. No, no, the professor said. Old Norse has a different pronunciation convention. Hrafnkell should be pronounced—and the sounds that came out of his mouth are not able to be rendered in the twenty-six letters available to me here. The Hraf is a guttural, rolled \HRAHP\, as if you stopped a sprinter who was out of breath and clearing their throat and asked them to say crap. The -n- is a swallowed hum, a little break so your vocal cords are ready for the glorious flourish that is -kell. Imagine saying blech—the sound kids in commercials make when presented with a plate of steamed broccoli instead of Strawberry Choco-Bomb Crunch cereal. Now replace the /bl/ with a /k/ as in kitten. That is the pronunciation of Hrafnkell.

No one could get that last sound right; the whole class sounded like cats disgorging hair balls. Ch, ch, our professor said, and we dutifully mimicked: uch, uch. I’m spitting all over myself, one student complained, whereupon the professor brightened. Yeah, he chirped, yeah, you’ve got it!

That final double-l in Old Norse, he said, was called the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. What? I blurted, and he repeated: voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. He went on to say it was used in Welsh, too, but I was lost to his explanation, instead tumbling in and over that label. Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. A sound that you make, that you give voice to, that is nonetheless called voiceless and that, when issued, can be aimed like a stream of chewing tobacco, laterally. And fricative—that sounded hopelessly, gorgeously obscene.

I approached the professor after class. I wanted, I told him, to major in this—Icelandic family sagas and weird pronunciations and whatever else there was.

You could do medieval studies, he suggested. Old English is the best place to start.

The following semester, twenty other students and I sat around a large conference table of the kind you only see in liberal arts colleges or movies with war rooms in them, while the same professor introduced us to Old English. Old English is the great-granddaddy of Modern English, an ancestor language that was spoken in England between roughly A.D. 500 and 1100. It looks like drunk, sideways German with some extra letters thrown in for good measure:

Hē is his brōðor.

Þæt wæs mīn wīf.

Þis līf is sceort.

Hwī singeð ðes monn?

But speak it aloud, and the family resemblance is clear:

He is his brother.

That was my wife.

This life is short.

Why is that man singing?

We stuttered our way through the translations. My professor went on to explain the pronunciation conventions of Old English; there is a handy and completely abstruse pronunciation section in our Bright’s Old English Grammar,*2 and the class delved right in.

But that first translation exercise left me with an itch at the back of my brain that wouldn’t go away: Hwī singeð ðes monn? I stared at the sentence for a while, wondering why the other sentences seemed to match their translations so well, but this one didn’t.

This was not the first of these itches: I had had them in high-school German class, when I realized how Vater and Mutter and Schwester looked like Amish cousins of father and mother and sister. I had had the same mental scratch in Latin, when I mumbled through my amo, amas, amat and realized that amour—an English word that refers to love or the beloved—looked a lot like the Latin verb amare, to love. I waited until after class and asked my professor about his translation of hwī singeð ðes monn? and he confessed that it wasn’t a literal, word-for-word translation; that would be why singeth this man? The itching intensified. I was vaguely aware that Shakespeare used certain words that we didn’t anymore—singeth being one of them—but I had never wondered why those earlier forms were different from the current ones. English is English, right? But English, I was fast learning, was fluid. Singeth wasn’t just a highfalutin flourish deployed to lend a sense of elevation and elegance to Shakespeare’s writings; singeth was a normal, boring way to say sing in the late sixteenth century. And it happened to be a holdover from Anglo-Saxon. We used singeth as the third-person form longer than we used sings.

I had spent years hoovering up words as quickly and indiscriminately as I could, the linguistic equivalent of a dog snarfing up spilled popcorn; I gobbled up sing and singeth without much thought about why the forms were so different. My only thought was stupid English. But those illogical lunacies of English that we all suffer through and rage against aren’t illogical at all. It’s all spelled out here, in the baby pictures of English.

From that point on, I was a woman obsessed: I traced words across the rough sword and buckler of Old English, over the sibilant seesaw of Middle English, through the bawdy wink-wink-nudge-nudge of Shakespeare; I picked and chipped at words like supercilious until I found the cool, slow-voweled Latin and Greek under them. I discovered that nice used to mean lewd and stew used to mean whorehouse. I hadn’t just fallen down this rabbit hole: I saw that hole in the distance and ran full tilt at it, throwing myself headlong into it. The more I learned, the more I fell in love with this wild, vibrant whore of a language.

—

H ands clasped tightly together, I tried to give Steve Perrault a heavily abridged and eloquent version of this history. He sat impassive across from me as I blithered, awash in flop sweat and aware—perhaps for the first time since I answered the want ad—that I really, really wanted this job, and I was really, really rambling.

I stopped and leaned in, breathless. I just, I began, fanning my hands in front of me as if to waft intelligence my way. But it didn’t come: all I had was the naked, heartfelt truth. I just love English, I burst. I love it. I really, really love it.

Steve took a deep breath. Well, he deadpanned, there are few who share your enthusiasm for it.

I started as an editorial assistant at Merriam-Webster three weeks later.

—

M erriam-Webster is the oldest dictionary maker in America, dating unofficially back to 1806 with the publication of Noah Webster’s first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and officially back to 1844, when the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Webster’s dictionary after his death. The company has been around longer than Ford Motors, Betty Crocker, NASCAR, and thirty-three of the fifty American states. It’s more American than football (a British invention) and apple pie (ditto). According to the lore, the flagship product of the company, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is one of the best-selling books in American history and may be second in sales only to the Bible. *3

You might expect such an august American institution to be housed in lofty Georgian or neoclassical digs, something in marble with a goodly number of columns, and a pristine lawn. Think of the architectural equivalent of the word dictionary, and what springs to mind is stained glass, vaulted ceilings, dark wood paneling, majestic draperies.

The reality is quite different. Merriam-Webster is housed in a modest two-story brick building located in what is euphemistically known as a transitional neighborhood in Springfield, Massachusetts. Drug deals occasionally happen in the parking lot, and there are bullet holes in the safety glass at the back of the building. The front door, framed with some moderately interesting brickwork and a lovely oriel window, is always locked; ring the bell and no one will answer it. Employees enter through the back of the building, hunched and hurried, like they’re sneaking into one of the strip clubs around the corner. The interior is full of odd juxtapositions, with historic ephemera sprinkled throughout a building whose aesthetic is best described as Office Bland. One side of the basement is a nonfunctioning cafeteria from the 1950s, which was converted to a lunchroom with stout wooden tables and vast echoic linoleum surfaces, with a small office tucked in the corner at garden level. The other side of the basement is wire-caged, dimly lit clutter that houses oddities like old grade-school dioramas of important moments in American history that have been donated to the company, crates of Urdu-language printings of our dictionaries, and the fusty glut of old papers bunged hastily into metal bookshelves. Wandering through the tight aisles, you can feel the heebie-jeebies brushing the back of your neck; it is the storage room of David Lynch’s dreams.

It’s not all Lovecraftian unease: two stately conference rooms bookend the building, done up with painted wood paneling and long drapes, dominated by massive, dark conference tables that are always polished to a mirror shine and upon which no one is allowed to place anything except special felt-backed desk pads. But those are the only rooms of grandeur in the place. The rest of the building is a rabbit warren of cubicles in varying shades of that noncolor, taupe. Even the coffee seems anachronistic: it’s anonymous stuff that comes in oversized orange foil packets—packets whose vintage seems to match the industrial coffeemaker we use that dates back to the Johnson administration. The grit in the foil packets produces coffee that tastes like wet cardboard, but it is our coffee and we will not change it. Recently, the editorial floor finally acquired one of those new one-cup jobbies that hiss like an angry lizard. People nonetheless make and drink the vile orange-foil stuff.

There’s an odd juxtaposition of people, too. Downstairs you’ll find the employees who enjoy talking: customer service, marketing, IT. It’s not a loud office, but there’s conversation, laughter, the electronic burble of phone calls, the whump of boxes being hefted and dumped. People prairie-dog over the tops of their cubicles and call to their co-workers: Hey, you going for a walk at lunch today? It is perfectly, blandly normal. Head up the echoey stairwell to the second floor, and the happy din damps into silence. You come to a landing with two heavy fire doors facing each other, closed. Listen; it sounds empty, abandoned, perhaps a little haunted. It doesn’t help that it’s also much darker in the stairwell than you anticipated. The tableau gets you wondering what weirdnesses they’ve squirreled away up here—more unsettling dioramas, perhaps, or Miss Havisham languishing in a dusty chaise longue—when one of the doors suddenly swings open. The person on the other side starts, eyes like dinner plates, then ducks their head, whispers, Sorry, and scurries around you. The door is open: beyond are more cubicles, lots of books, and the feel of people, though not the sound of people. Welcome to the editorial floor.

—

T he vast majority of people give no thought to the dictionary they use: it merely is, like the universe. To one group of people, the dictionary was handed to humanity ex coeli, a hallowed leather-clad tome of truth and wisdom as infallible as God. To another group of people, the dictionary is a thing you picked up in the bargain bin, paperback and on sale for a dollar, because you felt that an adult should own a dictionary. Neither group realizes that their dictionary is a human document, constantly being compiled, proofread, and updated by actual, living, awkward people. In that unassuming brick building in Springfield, there are a couple dozen people who spend their workweek doing nothing but making dictionaries—sifting the language, categorizing it, describing it, alphabetizing it. They are word nerds who spend the better parts of their lives writing and editing dictionary definitions, thinking deeply about adverbs, and slowly, inexorably going blind. They are lexicographers.

To be fair, most lexicographers didn’t think much about the people behind dictionaries before they applied for their jobs. For all of my love of English, I gave scant thought to the dictionary and never even realized that there was more than one dictionary; there is no "the dictionary but rather a dictionary or one of several dictionaries. The red Webster’s dictionary that we all used is just one of many Webster’s dictionaries, published by different publishers; Webster’s is not a proprietary name, and so any publisher can slap it on any reference they like. And they do: nearly every American reference publisher since the nineteenth century has put out a reference and called it a Webster’s."*4 But I knew none of this until I started working at Merriam-Webster. If I gave dictionaries so little thought, then I gave lexicography itself bugger all.

This is the song of my people. Most lexicographers had no clue that such a career path existed until they were smack in the middle of it.

Neil Serven, an editor at Merriam-Webster, is an outlier. He sums up his brief childhood musings on how dictionaries came to be thusly: I imagined dark halls and angry people.

There are not many of us plying our trade these days; language may be a growth industry, but dictionaries are not. (When’s the last time you bought a new dictionary? I thought so.) And yet whenever I tell people what I do—and after they make me repeat it, because the statement I write dictionaries is so unexpected—one of the first things they ask is if we’re hiring. Sit in a room all day, read, ponder the meanings of words—to anyone who even remotely likes words, it sounds like the ideal job.

At Merriam-Webster, there are only two formal requirements to be a lexicographer: you must have a degree in any field from an accredited four-year college or university, and you must be a native speaker of English.

People are surprised (and perhaps slightly appalled) to hear that we don’t require lexicographers to be linguists or English majors. The reality is that a diverse group of drudges will yield better definitions. Most lexicographers are general definers; that is, they define all sorts of words from all subject areas, from knitting to military history to queer theory to hot-rodding. And while you don’t need expertise in every field conceivable in order to define the vocabulary used in that field, there are some fields whose lexicon is a little more opaque than others:

When P* is less than P, the Fed can ease its credit policies, allowing bank credit and the money supply to grow at a faster rate. The P* formula is:

P* = M2 x V*/Q*

where M2 is an official measure of the money supply (checks plus checkable deposits, savings, and time deposit accounts), V* is the velocity of M2, or the number of times that money turns over, and Q* is the estimated value of Gross National Product at a nominal growth rate of 2.5% a year.

To someone like me who has an antagonistic relationship with math, this is a nightmare. What’s P? Checkable deposits are different from checks? Money has velocity (and not just away from me)? If there’s someone on staff, however, who has taken economics courses, they are likely equipped to navigate this sea of jargon. Consequently, we have a minyan of English and linguistics majors on staff, but we also have economists, scientists of every stripe, historians, philosophers, poets, artists, mathematicians, international business majors, and enough medievalists to staff a Renaissance Faire.

We also require that our lexicographers be native speakers of English, for a very practical reason: that’s the language we focus on, and you need mastery over all its idioms and expressions. It is a sad reality that in your daily work as a lexicographer, you will read some good writing and a lot of mediocre and terrible writing. You need to be able to know, without being told, that the cat are yowling is not grammatically correct whereas the crowd are loving it is just very British.

Your status as a native speaker of English also becomes a place of comfort you can return to throughout your career. There will come a point when you are deep in the weeds of a word, hunched over your desk in bone-crushing, head-in-hands concentration. You will have been staring at this entry for days, unsure of how to proceed, and that filament of sanity inside you will suddenly fizzle and snap. It will become clear to you, in the space between heartbeats, why you are having a hard time with this entry: it is because you realize now that you do not, in fact, actually speak English—that the words you are reading are in some Low German dialect and you are no longer certain that they mean anything. It will be 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday in April; you will glimpse preternaturally sunny weather through the sliver of window near your desk; the shouts of children walking home from school will sound both alien and familiar; cool, metallic panic will slide down your gullet and wave up at you from your stomach. Don’t be alarmed: this is normal when you spend all day alone with nothing but the English language. Simply stand, walk briskly downstairs, and ask the first marketing or customer service person you see, Am I speaking English? They will assure you that you are. They might remind you that we hire only people who speak it natively.

There are some additional unmeasurable and unstated requirements to be a lexicographer. First and foremost, you must be possessed of something called sprachgefühl, a German word we’ve stolen into English that means a feeling for language. Sprachgefühl is a slippery eel, the odd buzzing in your brain that tells you that planting the lettuce and planting misinformation are