![]() If done well, a dictionary definition “stands in as a witness to the whole culture,” as Oxford English Dictionary editor Edmund Weiner puts it. “I feel the potential of my database is unlimited,” he says.īut while going online will provide a portal for people to suggest new terms that need defining, Green wants the definitions to remain lexicographer-grade. (Take this excerpt from a 1917 letter: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis–O.M.G.”) At Green’s London flat, it takes him 0.4 seconds to pull up 403 thoroughly researched synonyms for a promiscuous woman. Green’s Dictionary of Slang covers ground that traditional dictionaries will not, and that will help fill some gaps: as any lexicographer will tell you, even a word that you’re encountering for the first time is probably older than you think. Green parses even the most obscene, NSFW slang with the seriousness of a biologist dissecting a frog, and he plans to make his $625 set of three hulking volumes far more useful by turning them into a searchable database, with 130,000 words and phrases, this summer. Take the top search result for on fleek: “A work used by uncultured idiots.” Says lexicographer Jane Solomon: “You have to sift through a lot to get to these core pieces of information.” Lexicographer Jonathon Green, who wrote the most comprehensive dictionary of English slang ever printed, is less diplomatic: “It is a joke.” ![]() Much like Wikipedia, that crowdsourced website can be a good place to start asking a question about what a word means, but experts say it doesn’t produce exhaustive answers–nor always serious ones. “I also believe that something is always better than nothing.” Other innovators are bringing rich data online for the first time and even reimagining the very nature of what a dictionary can be. “A really good definition is a beautiful thing,” says Erin McKean, a lexicographer who founded the “Internet-age” dictionary company Wordnik. So while dictionary makers may rightly wait years before giving a new word the full treatment, other experts are trying to give the reading public something reliable in the meantime by finding a compromise between authority and speed. “We have to wait for words to settle both in meaning and pronunciation,” says Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster. ![]() As Aston University linguist Jack Grieve says, “A new word is more likely to take off and spread now than in the past because it’s easier for it to move.” Yet writing definitions remains a methodical exercise in observation and distillation. The yearlong lapse-which is relatively fast for a traditional dictionary to add a word-highlights a problem that academics and linguists are trying to solve: lexicographers, the experts who write gold-standard definitions, cannot keep up with demand in an era when words travel by fiber-optic cable and not just by mouth or mail. ![]()
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