Editorial

Abstract

Editorial M. Lynne Murphy Five new research articles constitute this issue of Dictionaries, representing work on the history, use, and production of dictionaries. In the opening article, "Derwent Coleridge's 'Rough Notes': A Newly Discovered Manuscript from the Formative Years of the Oxford English Dictionary," John Considine and Peter Gilliver share their discovery of "Rough notes on the subject of the New English Dictionary." Derwent was the second son of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and uncle to Herbert Coleridge, the dictionary's first editor. His influence on the Oxford English Dictionary had largely been overlooked until now. I am excited to be able to share Considine and Gilliver's full transcription of the manuscript and their detailed commentary on the history of these notes, the thinking behind their contents, and their effect on the "Canones Lexicographici," establishing key points of the OED's editorial policy. Michael Robertson, in "New Solutions for Words in Thomas Speght's Chaucer Glossaries," investigates seventeen mysterious items from the lists of "old and obscure words" in Speght's 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer's works. These items had been thought to be "unidentifiable"—not clearly related to any other English (or non-English) word. Still many of them appeared in later dictionaries. Digitization of Speght's work (not to mention many other resources) has made the practically unsearchable into the investigable, and Robertson traces these "ghost words" back to "variant readings, corruptions and misprints" in earlier editions of Chaucer, offering solutions to these lexical mysteries. According to Wikipedia, sales of Funk & Wagnalls' dictionaries went up 30% after the comedy show Laugh-In introduced the catchphrase [End Page vii] "Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls!"1 Alas, the brand has not survived to feel the boost of Dennis Baron's allusion to it in "Look It Up in Your Funk & Wagnalls: How Courts Define the Words of the Law." Baron explores the American justice system's use and abuse of lexicography in defining, for legal purposes, words that include: concrete nouns, like doll and tomato; abstractions, like sanitation and marriage; and even grammatical items like of. Baron traces how, in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, courts have manipulated the "authority" of dictionaries in order to give a semblance of objectivity to their own authoritative interpretation of words in law. Next, David Micklethwait sights a ghost editor in the Webster's Improved Dictionary of the English Language published by William Mackenzie of Glasgow around 1858. "Thomas Heber Orr, the Evaporating Editor" is credited with enlarging and improving the dictionary and with discovering a new theory of etymology, the unintentionally[?] amusing "Process of Primitive Wordgrowth." Micklethwait traces Orr's presence and absence in the publishing trade, concluding that Mackenzie was mostly likely responsible for the work attributed to Orr. In the final contribution to this issue, we turn away from the historical and toward the future. Akbar Hesabi and Alireza Amraee are working "Toward the Specialization of Language Resources for Translators." Having observed that translators are underserved by existing resources, Hesabi and Amraee have built a bilingual resource that uses FrameNet structures and corpus data to offer translators insights into word usage in a particular domain (in this model case, road traffic and transportation) across their two languages. In doing so, they stretch the meaning of dictionary considerably, since the resource does not offer traditional entry or definition structures. That might not be to all readers' taste, but [End Page viii] for me it brings into focus the question of what dictionaries are, and therefore what the title of this very journal refers to, in the connected, post-paper age. I hope each reader finds something of interest in this issue of Dictionaries and that it inspires new questions and directions for investigation. Book reviews and the Reference Works in Progress feature will return next time. [End Page ix] Footnotes 1. My confidence in this claim is undermined by the "citation needed" footnote at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls (accessed November 16, 2022). Nevertheless, I am imagining all the product placement opportunities dictionary publishers might be able to exploit in the current comedy climate. Copyright © 2022 Dictionary Society of North...