Dictionary,n.A
malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it
hard and inelastic.
(Ambrose
Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)
The
dictionary that we buy in a bookshop contain information also found in our
mental dictionaries. The first dictionary to be printed in England was the
Latin-English Promptorium parvulorum in 1499; another Latin-English dictionary
by Sir Thomas Elyot was published in 1538. One of the best efforts at
lexicography (‘the editing or making of a dictionary’ as it is defined in The
Webster’s Third New Dictionary of the English Language: Unabridged) was the
Dictionary of the English language by Dr Samuel Johnson, published in 1755 in
two volumes. In 1828, Noah Webster published An American Dictionary of the English
Language, with 70 000 entries in two volumes.
The
aim of most early lexicographers, whom Dr Johnson called ‘harmless drudges’.
Was to ‘prescribe’ rather than ‘describe’ the words of a language; to be, as in
the stated aim of one Webster’s dictionary, the ‘supreme authority’ on the
‘correct’ pronunciation and meaning of a word. It is to Johnson’s credit that
in his preface he stated he could not construct the language but only ‘register
the language’.
As
we have said, no speaker of English knows all of the words listed in any large
dictionary; but all speakers know more about the words in their mental
dictionaries than can be found in any published edition. Chapter 4 will discuss
some of the syntactic information that must be part of a speaker’s lexical
knowledge but that is not found in even the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
The first edition of the OED was published in 1933. Many lexicographers worked
without salary from 1888 to 1928 to produce this great piece of scholarship in
twelve volumes. Not even the twenty-volume second edition of 1989 claims to
contain all our lexical knowledge.
All
dictionaries, from the OED to the more commonly used desk dictionaries such as
the Macquarie Dictionary, provide the following information about each word:
(1) its spelling; (2) the ‘standard’ pronunciation; (3) definitions to
represent (part of speech, such as noun, verb. Other information may be
included, such as the etymology or history of the word and whether the word is
‘non-standard’ (such as ain’t), slang, ‘vulgar’, or ‘obsolete’. Many
dictionaries provide quotations from published literature to illustrate the
given definitions, as Johnson first did.
In
recent years, perhaps due to the increasing specialization in science and the
arts or the growing fragmentation of populace, we have seen the proliferation
of hundreds of specialty and subspecialty dictionaries. Dictionaries of slang
and jargon have been around for many years, as have multilingual dictionaries,
but in addition to these, the shelves of bookshops and libraries are now filled
with dictionaries written specifically for biologists, engineers,
agriculturalists, economists, artists, architects, printers, gays and lesbians,
transvestites, athletes, tennis players, and almost any group that has its own set
of words to describe what they think and what they do. Our own mental
dictionaries probably only include a small set of the entries in all of these
dictionaries, but each word is in someone’s lexicon. On the other hand, it is
interesting to think that scholarly lexicographers spend years writing
dictionaries which include information that young children store in their
mental dictionaries with great ease.
