Abstract
Abstract Placed at the interface between metalexicography and gender studies, this short article discusses issues concerning gender representations in present-day dictionaries. Evoking recent controversies regarding the representation of gender-related terms such as “cisgender” or “woman” in The Oxford English Dictionary, the essay goes on to discuss the prescriptive/descriptive opposition concerning lexicographical representations, taking its cue from previous approaches, which suggest re-envisaging the prescriptive/descriptive dyad as a continuum (Straaijer, 2009; Wilton 2014), or replacing this traditional binary model with a nonbinary approach (Nossem, 2018; Turton, 2020).
Highlights
A dictionary’s inclusivenessEven if digital dictionary apps are becoming more commonly used than print dictionaries, the need to look a word up remains ever so present, whether we google that word, or whether we use the online Merriam Webster and the humorous, irreverent, and at times unreliable Urban Dictionary
Dictionaries acquired a normative function in the eighteenth century (“the age of prescriptivism”) and in spite of the shift towards the descriptive approach embodied by late nineteenth-century/ early twentieth-century texts such as The Oxford English Dictionary, where the proposal was to register words without judgement, the normative function is still something which current dictionary-users expect their dictionaries to fulfil, irrespective if the dictionary authors themselves conceive of their text as prescriptive or not
Recent approaches centring on metalexicography, which include a gender studies dimension, have attempted to look at dictionaries in a way which means to shift focus away from dictionaries authored predominantly by male authors (Johnson, Webster, etc.), by recuperating the role of female lexicographers in the representation of language, as does Russell (2018) in her book, Women and Dictionary-Making
Summary
A dictionary’s inclusivenessEven if digital dictionary apps are becoming more commonly used than print dictionaries, the need to look a word up remains ever so present, whether we google that word, or whether we use the online Merriam Webster and the humorous, irreverent, and at times unreliable Urban Dictionary. Dictionaries acquired a normative function in the eighteenth century (“the age of prescriptivism”) and in spite of the shift towards the descriptive approach embodied by late nineteenth-century/ early twentieth-century texts such as The Oxford English Dictionary, where the proposal was to register words without judgement
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