Dictionary Editor's Lingo

Abstract

ALEXICOGRAPHER might well seem the last person in the world to be an innovator in language. Yet, like other specialized groups, the staffs of the Middle English Dictionary and the Early Modern English Dictionary now in preparation at the University of Michigan have gradually developed a cant which reveals several tendencies common in the process of linguistic change. These special meanings and uses may be more easily seen in relation to the actual procedure of editing, say, the Early Modern English Dictionary. Since this, like the great Oxford, is a historical dictionary (1475 to 1700), this procedure has its inception with the mass of historical evidence already available in the files in the form of 4,500,000 slips of paper, each about four by seven inches in size. When an editor or sub-editor (a term borrowed from Oxford practice) takes the slips comprising the illustrative evidence for a word or group of words, he finds, of course, that they have already been alphabetized and chronologized. Such work has been done principally by N.Y.A.-ers (or N.Y.A.'s) and W.P.A.-ers assigned by the local divisions of the National Youth Administration and the Works Progress Administration. For an extremely rare word, such as the adverb 'tutelarly,' there may be only one slip, a oncer; for a common word such as 'lay' there may be nearly 4,000 slips. Most of these slips bear quots [kwots] or quotations, illustrating a particular use of the catch-word written in the upper lefthand corner. An occasional slip bearing two or more catch-words is known as a send-on, for extra copies must be made and sent on for each of the other significant words in the quot. Many of the slips with which the editor works are from the more than 2,ooo,ooo OD slips made available from the collections of the Oxford English Dictionary. Others, called readers' slips, are from the mass of more than 1,ooo,ooo gathered for the dictionary by the corps of volunteer readers, chiefly English scholars in American colleges, and by various staff members. Only a volunteer is ordinarily termed a reader, although all such slips are readers' slips. Besides these are hundreds of thousands of slips prepared by various mechanical duplicating processes. Stenciled slips are what the name implies; photographed slips are not, being really facsimiles made by blueprinting or by the offset process. If in cutting up facsimile pages into