Putting together a dictionary is hard. Or if you prefer, difficile or Augean.
It’s one of those indispensable elements of civilization that many of us take for granted, like electricity. But its creation and constant re-creation is surprisingly complicated and labor-intensive.
For a fascinating peek behind the process, pick up “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries” by Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. It’s part memoir, part workplace chronicle and part history lesson.
Merriam-Webster dates back to the 1830s — though its headquarters belie its illustrious history. The company is housed in a two-story brick building located in 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,” Stamper writes.
Putting out the dictionary is slow. The latest unabridged edition, “Webster’s Third New International,” took some twelve years to compile, employing a staff of almost 100 editors and 202 consultants.
To become lexicographer, applicants must meet two formal requirements: They must have a college degree in any field, and they must be native English speakers.
One of the best perks of working for Merriam-Webster is the job is essentially being paid to read.
Much of the work of producing an updated edition is identifying new words and phrases. (A 1990s revision of the Collegiate Dictionary added some 10,000 new entries.)
So lexicographers spend hours poring over magazines and newspapers, including “Vibe,” “Better Homes and Gardens” and “The Rocky Mountain News,” looking for material to flag for potential entry.
(The system is based on dictionary publisher Samuel Johnson’s from the 1750s.)
What’s included does not necessarily represent “proper” speech.
“Many people…believe that the dictionary is some great guardian of the English language, that its job is to set boundaries of decorum around this profligate language like a great linguistic housemother setting curfew,” Stamper writes. Not so. The dictionary’s mission is not to judgmentally police the language, but to simply observe and record how people are using it.
To merit inclusion, a word has to meet three criteria. It needs to have widespread use in print. For example, “muggle” originally from the Harry Potter series is now used in mainstream news articles to describe a provincial person.
So goes the life of a lexicographer, who get up every day knowing the work will never be done, as the language is constantly changing.
Secondly, a word has to have — in the opinion of the staff — “a long shelf life.”
Stamper recounts a time in the 1980s when the editors decided to dump “snollygoster,” meaning an unprincipled person, from the book, only to have a TV personality latch onto the word some ten years later, giving it a high profile.
“America is now on the cusp of a ‘snollygoster’ revival, and, boy, do we feel stupid,” she writes. It was re-inserted earlier this year.
The final requirement for inclusion is that a word must have “meaningful use.”
Seems obvious, but take pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a 45-character nonsense word referring to a lung ailment. It was supposedly invented in 1935 by the president of the National Puzzlers’ League as a parody of complicated medical jargon “just to see if dictionaries would fall for it.”
“We did,” Stamper writes. “We’re a little more careful now.” (The word was dropped from the Collegiate Dictionary in 1983 but remains in the Unabridged Dictionary.)
The staff must then define the potential new words.
“One of the biggest problems in writing definitions: things change, and you are a lexicographer, not a clairvoyant,” she writes.
Take the definition for “hotel” written in the 1950s, that described a building for overnight accommodation “providing personal services (as hairdressing, shoe shining), and with telephone booths, writing tables and washrooms freely available.”
The modern definition is more pared down.
Regardless of how careful the editors are, Merriam-Webster receives a flood of emails and letters griping about various points. (Editors actually respond.) Many irate readers write to object about the word “irregardless.”
“People’s hatred of ‘irregardless’ is specific and vehemently serious,” Stamper writes.
Many of the words that do make it in start off as spoken slang, leaving the editors with the sometimes thankless task of tracking down word origins. Is “twerk” an altered form of “work?” And is “molly,” the street name for the drug MDMA, a bastardization of the UK slang for the powder, “mandy?”
And then there’s “on fleek,” a phrase that means “good” or “on point.” In June 2014, a 16-year-old teen named Peaches Monroee posted a six-second video of herself referring to her eyebrows as “on fleek.” Five months later, some 10 percent of all Google searches worldwide were for the term.
Was it a mix of “flick” and “on point,” or perhaps a blend of “fly” and “chic,” the editors wondered. A colleague of Stamper’s called Monroee to find out. Turns out, the girl just made it up.
And so goes the life of a lexicographer, who get up every day knowing the work will never be done, as the language is constantly changing.
“A dictionary,” Stamper writes, “is out of date the minute that it’s done.”