How Global Events and Social Change Affect Modern Lexicography

Abstract

How Global Events and Social Change Affect Modern Lexicography Ben Zimmer (bio) Long gone are the days when dictionary publishers were only expected to push out major revisions every decade or so when a new print edition appeared, with perhaps occasional updates adding new entries and senses along the way, depending on the production schedule. Ever since the advent of online dictionary publishing, lexicographers have increasingly taken advantage of the agility of digital content creation in order to react speedily to the latest lexical developments. As dictionaries have shifted to having a primarily online presence, some in the industry have rosily portrayed the move from page to pixel as a “liberation from the straitjacket of print” (Zimmer 2014). Kory Stamper, in her book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, summed up this evolution: “Dictionaries move online and they are no longer fixed objects, revered books kept on the family shelf, but malleable, ever-changing works that mirror the quicksilver nature of our language” (Stamper 2017, 258). But when dictionaries are no longer “fixed objects”—the weighty tome sitting magisterially on the dictionary stand—do they lose some of their traditional authority? And in what ways should dictionaries be “malleable” and “ever-changing”? For most dictionary publishers, this malleability has meant adding and revising entries at a vastly more accelerated pace, along with [End Page 41] various other changes to the way that the major digital dictionaries present their information to an online audience (Zimmer 2017). Perhaps most notably, lexicographers have learned to become more nimble in addressing dynamic social situations regarding word usage, as well as in responding to changing expectations from users of their online dictionaries. New socio-political realities, such as those brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, have the potential of deeply affecting or even upending standard lexicographical practices. The three papers in this forum provide distinct perspectives on how exactly lexicographers are adapting to these contemporary concerns, with insights from different dictionary programs. Stefan Fatsis, in “Thirty-Four Days: Inside Merriam-Webster’s Emergency Coronavirus Update,” provides an object lesson in just how expeditiously a dictionary publisher can respond to global events, even a publisher not traditionally known for its editorial alacrity. When, in 1984, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary added an entry for AIDS a mere two years after the acronym first appeared in print, it was seen as an outlier, contravening the more deliberate approach favored by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary editors. But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, it was clear that an entire array of pandemic-related terms, including Covid-19 and the shorter Covid, would need to enter the dictionary as quickly as possible. Merriam-Webster’s turnaround of slightly longer than a month, measured from the time that the World Health Organization established the official Covid-19 terminology, signaled a remarkable shift in the way that lexicographers could mobilize as a kind of rapid-response team—a shift that was simultaneously mirrored at other major dictionary publishers making their own special pandemic updates in 2020. Wendalyn Nichols and Lewis C. Lawyer offer the vantage point from Cambridge Dictionaries in their paper, “Identifying Emergent Meanings via the Word of the Year Process: A Case Study.” The Cambridge lexicographers, upon selecting quarantine as their Word of the Year for 2020, discovered that their entry for the word was sorely lacking in capturing Covid-era usage patterns. Corpus analysis helped reveal just what those patterns look like, necessitating a revision to the quarantine entry to account for its evolving semantic outlines. No longer is a quarantine expected to last for a specific period of time, and the word has become applied to healthy people seeking to avoid the disease rather [End Page 42] than simply sequestering those who are potentially contagious. It is also notable that the process of revising the quarantine entry was set into motion by analyzing spikes in lookup data for the Cambridge Dictionary website in order to make a quantitatively sound Word of the Year selection. Analyzing lookups can help lexicographers pinpoint which entries are most salient to dictionary users at any given time, thus focusing their editorial attention on what is most valuable...