Is the Dictionary Done For?
He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to be slapped or punched.” Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, was his illustration, until he came across a tweet from Ted Cruz’s college roommate. “When I met Ted in 1988,” it said, “I had no word describe him, but only because I didn’t speak German.”
Fatsis concludes, a little reluctantly, not only that the dictionary may be on its last legs as a commercial enterprise but that lexicographical expertise is expiring with it. He cites an estimate that, twenty-five years ago, there were two hundred full-time lexicographers in the U.S. Today, he thinks that the number is “probably closer to thirty.” “By the time I finished this book,” he writes, “it wasn’t clear how long flesh-bone-and-blood lexicographers would be needed to chronicle the march of the English language.”
Most free online dictionaries (the free merriam-webster.com was originally based on the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate; the company also has a subscription site) are not heavy on lexicographic detail. They are mainly for people who enjoy playing with words. Definitions and correct spellings are no longer the principal attraction. Websites feature a “word of the day,” crossword puzzles and word games, lists of emojis, trending slang, usage tips (“Is it ‘nip it in the butt’ or ‘nip it in the bud?’ ”), translation programs, and, of course, ads. Poets and professors are still seduced by the Oxford English Dictionary’s supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (which is considered a word by the O.E.D.) etymologies, constructed from a database that dates back to 1857. W. H. Auden is supposed to have worn out his first copy of the O.E.D. from consulting it so often.
But the O.E.D. is subsidized. Merriam-webster.com is not. It needs eyeballs to survive. Merriam-Webster is now owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, another big print-era brand—the original edition was published in Scotland in 1768—that is struggling to compete in an online realm dominated by the nonprofit Wikipedia. Britannica has been losing market share since 1993, when Microsoft released its digital encyclopedia, Encarta. Fatsis quotes a Britannica editor comparing Wikipedia, disparagingly, to a public rest room—a comparison that’s not entirely wrong. It’s not the most elegant website, but everyone uses it. Britannica stopped printing its physical volumes in 2012.
The problem for Merriam-Webster is that it’s too easy to get definitions for free. The problem for the rest us is the same, but for a different reason. As with everything on the web, looking up a word opens a fire hose of controversy and misinformation. The faith that the old Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, once the iconic eighth-grade-graduation gift, contained the definitive definition, spelling, and pronunciation of every word an educated person needed to know was an effect of smart promotion. But so what? It had authority. Maybe it was validated only by Merriam-Webster’s market position, but we live in a market economy. That should be good enough for us. The relationship of the signifier to the signified is (as we all know) arbitrary. We can live with arbitrary. We just need the relationship to be stable, and the old Merriam-Webster was a touchstone of stability. We’ve lost that. Does it matter?
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in London in 1755, carved out a role for the dictionary: to establish what would become known as Standard English. Johnson himself was aware that language is a living thing, always in flux. But his dictionary, with its conclusiveness, was a huge publishing success. It was considered authoritative well into the nineteenth century. In England, it would be replaced by the Oxford English Dictionary. But, in the United States, its role was usurped by Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, which made its début in 1828.
Webster deliberately set out to supersede Johnson. His ambition was to create not a dialect of British English but an identifiably American language. Johnson’s dictionary had about forty-two thousand words; Webster’s had seventy thousand. Webster added New World words including “skunk,” “boost,” and “roundabout”; words with Native American origins, such as “canoe” and “moose”; words derived from Mexican Spanish, like “coyote.” Most dramatically, he Americanized spelling, a project started in an earlier work of his, a schoolbook speller called “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” published in 1783. It is because of Webster that we write “defense” and “center” rather than “defence” and “centre,” “public” and not “publick.” He changed the language.
Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, announced as “unabridged,” appeared in 1934. Web. II was a doorstop—six hundred thousand entries, thirty-five thousand geographical names, and, in the appendix, thirteen thousand biographical names. It is really an encyclopedia as much as it is a dictionary. It has full-page illustrations of “Coins of the World,” “Common Birds of America,” “Poisonous Plants,” and so on. Some editions include a four-hundred-page “Reference History of the World.” There are twenty definition entries beginning with “banana.”
