The Treatment of Slang in "Webster's Third New International Dictionary"

Abstract

OR THIS article,1 the pivotal work was Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang,2 and I depended upon it for all of the entries noted, tabulated, and discussed. If a term does not appear in the DAS, its absence automatically removes it from possible consideration in either the second edition3 or the third edition4 of Webster's New International Dictionary. For the letters selected (A, B, C, L, M, N), each meaning in the DAS was compared to its counterpart in the NID 3, if one was listed there.5 If a comparable meaning was found in the NID 3, its designation as slang (by being so labeled) or standard (since unlabeled) was noted. The meanings thus marked (and no others) were then checked in the NID 2 and, where present, were noted once more according to their designations (slang, vulgar, dialectal, illiterate, humorous, and so on) in the NID 2; unlabeled entries were again handled as being presumably standard. As a final step, it was necessary only to compare the two sets of data in order to arrive at the tabulations below and to draw some conclusions about the labeling policies followed in the NID 2 and the NID 3. For a study of this sort, it would be desirable that controlling reference works have the same general policy toward slang, at least with regard to its definition and labeling. Such, however, is not the case. The DAS is more than a dictionary; it is also a colloquial and dialectal dictionary. The authors state in the Explanatory Notes: