Introduction
You likely view the dictionary as an infallible, static authority that arbitrates proper English. When you encounter a disputed word, you expect a neat verdict on whether it is correct or incorrect.
Lexicography is a meticulous, human-driven craft that records the fluid, messy reality of language rather than policing it.
Kory Stamper reveals the unglamorous reality behind dictionary offices, where lexicographers work on glacial timelines. You will discover how editors collect citations, debate grammar, and decode tricky function words.
- How do lexicographers decide when a slang term enters the lexicon?
- Why do native speakers react with such fury when descriptive dictionaries record common usage?
- What mechanical steps transform a raw citation into a published definition?
1. The Dictionary Office
Dictionary publishers operate in modest environments on glacial multi-year timelines.
Kory Stamper notes that Merriam-Webster is housed in an ordinary brick building in a transitional neighborhood in Springfield, Massachusetts. The second floor features quiet taupe-colored cubicles and vintage 1950s nonfunctioning cafeterias, alongside bullet-resistant glass in the back.
Becoming a general definer requires two formal requirements: a degree in any field from an accredited four-year college, and being a native speaker of English. Staff members include economists, scientists, historians, philosophers, and medievalists. You need sprachgefuhl, an intuitive feeling for language nuances that alerts you to subtle distinctions.
The editorial floor enforces near-silence to protect editors from cognitive interruptions. Staff members traditionally rely on physical color-coded index cards for both editorial notes and internal office communication:
- white cards for citations;
- blue cards for production references;
- yellow cards, known as buffs, for drafted definitions;
- pink cards, known as pinks, for miscellaneous notes and personal communications.
Samuel Johnson famously characterized lexicographers as harmless drudges in his 1747 letter to the Earl of Chesterfield. He described dictionary making as a labor devoid of high praise, requiring dull patience and endless tracking along the alphabet. The 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language set an early benchmark for this exhausting work.
Dictionary production operates on multi-year timelines that make the work exceptionally slow. Webster's Third New International took 12 years to write, with a staff of 100 editors and 202 outside consultants. A standard Collegiate Dictionary takes 3 to 5 years to complete. A successor project starting in 2010 employed 25 editors.
2. Grammar and Parts of Speech
Grammatical parts of speech are not rigid, discrete categories, but rather fluid classifications that bleed into one another. You will discover that words frequently shift functions within sentences, leading to a phenomenon called gradience where nouns, verbs, and adjectives overlap in usage.
Grammatical categories are fluid and descriptive rather than rigid and prescriptive.
In the sentence "The young editors were bent to Webster’s will," editors debated whether "bent" functioned as a passive verb, an adjective, or a transitive action requiring the editorial Transitizer card. Lexicographers use specialized physical tools to test ambiguous grammatical functions in sentences. Peter Sokolowski keeps the Transitizer card featuring the sentence "I’ma ______ ya ass" to determine if tricky verbs are transitive.
The Western system of eight parts of speech was modeled entirely on Latin and Greek, which creates structural mismatches for English. Established around the second century B.C. in The Art of Grammar, the classification system fails to map cleanly onto English because classical languages lacked certain structural features like definite and indefinite articles. While Latin and Attic Greek lack indefinite or definite articles in various ways, English is saturated with them, forcing lexicographers to awkwardly categorize words like "a".
Modern lexicography relies on descriptivism to record actual language use, whereas popular grammar relies on prescriptivism to enforce arbitrary rules. While the public and historical grammarians view dictionaries as moral guardians that ban bad words, lexicographers operate as objective observers who enter words based on widespread and sustained use in written prose. Gilman taught young lexicographers to accept that "good" has functioned as an adverb for nearly a thousand years despite continuous condemnation from usage commentators.
Written English spelling became standardized not through natural speech but through the bureaucratic needs of law courts and printers. When English replaced French and Latin as an official language of record in the fifteenth century, it lacked a standard spelling, unlike heavily regulated classical languages. Middle English featured a staggering seventy-seven different recorded ways to spell the word "right" before Chancery Standard and printers like William Caxton enforced regularity. In the 1417 year Henry V began using English in official correspondence.
Grammar rules were historically tied to social class and morality during the eighteenth-century rise of the middle class. As merchants made money and tried to enter polite society, etiquette and letter-writing guides emerged to link correct grammar directly with moral uprightness and gentlemanly status. Bishop Robert Lowth published A Short Introduction to English Grammar in 1762, arguing that propriety of expression was indispensable for anyone addressing the public. Another relevant guide was the 1725 publication of The Complete English Tradesman.
The rule against ending sentences with prepositions originated from classical imitation rather than actual English structure. Seventeenth-century poet John Dryden imposed Latin structural rules onto English because he believed Latin represented the ne plus ultra of elegance, leading him to scrub terminal prepositions from his later works. Dryden translated his sentences into Latin to test their elegance, which caused him to condemn the terminal preposition that had been used continuously in English for centuries.
The rule separating possessive "its" and contractive "it's" ignores centuries of established usage by master writers. Although modern sticklers treat the confusion of "its" and "it's" as an unpardonable sin signaling illiteracy, historical texts show the possessive "it's" was widely used by authors like Thomas Jefferson, Jane Austen, and Abraham Lincoln. Lynne Truss claimed in Eats, Shoots & Leaves that writing "Good food at it’s best" deserves an unmarked grave, yet major publications frequently slip the possessive contraction past editors.
3. The Case of Irregardless
Dictionaries record language usage rather than dictate it, even when users demand gatekeeping.
Dictionary users write in with immense anger when words they deem unworthy appear in the dictionary. Editors who took the job to avoid human interaction must calmly explain lexicographical rationale based on ample textual evidence. Since the 1860s, dictionary users have been encouraged to write to Merriam-Webster with questions.
Kory Stamper previously held jobs where she was yelled at, including working as a bakery assistant where a customer threw an Elmo cake at her head, making her a frequent responder to angry e-mails.
The word "irregardless" invokes intense public rage because people view it as illogical, redundant, and a sign of uneducated speech, despite its frequent historical appearance in edited prose. Critics argue it combines a negative prefix with a negative suffix to mean the opposite of its intent, but dictionaries record language usage rather than dictate it. Redundancy is common in English, and eliminating all redundant or illogical words would destroy half the language. In 2003, a managing editor received an email claiming "irregardless" was a superlative form of regardless among educated Mississippians.
Lexicographers rely on raw snippets of real-world text called citations to justify dictionary entries. By investigating paper citation files dating back to the nineteenth century, the author discovered that "irregardless" developed a nuanced emphatic use in dialectal speech, functioning similarly to an oral wave of the hand to forestall discussion. A citation from a poor black artist named Mr. Sweet used "irregardless" with italics and a contextual framing of "as the old people said". Evidence of peculiar emphatic uses of "irregardless" was found from the 1860s.
English is not a single uniform ribbon of water but a river made of many distinct currents, including regional and social dialects. Each dialect has its own vocabulary, syntax, phonology, and grammar. While people often polarize and stereotype dialects associated with specific social classes or ethnicities, they are essential components of linguistic growth and the foundation of language. The author grew up speaking a mix of General Western American while absorbing Chicano English and African-American Vernacular English at school.
Speakers often modify their natural dialects to avoid social stigma and political scrutiny, eventually learning to switch between their native dialect and Standard English. Schools and society frequently enforce Standard English as the sole correct norm, causing speakers to abandon natural phonological features like g-dropping or lax vowel tensing to pass as educated. The author's mother mimicked and challenged her speech when she adopted local slang, making her realize her dialect reflected poorly on her in certain social contexts.
The marginalization of dialects can carry severe real-world consequences when a speaker's testimony is misunderstood or discredited in a court of law. When witnesses testify using nonstandard dialects like African-American Vernacular English or Haitian Creole, juries and transcribers unfamiliar with the grammar may misinterpret statements, leading to grave miscarriages of justice. Sociolignuist John Rickford analyzed the testimony of Rachel Jeantel in the Trayvon Martin case, demonstrating how her use of AAVE and flawed transcriptions contributed to her testimony being discredited by the jury.
4. Corpus and Citation Gathering
Early English dictionaries evolved in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from bilingual trade tools into monolingual hard-word lists aimed at educating the literate class. Robert Cawdrey published A Table Alphabeticall in 1604 as the first proper monolingual English dictionary, targeting educated people with hard words while throwing shade at those who spoke merely to impress. Other early milestones included Richard Mulcaster's Elementarie in 1582 and Edmund Coote's The English Schoole-Maister in 1596.
Lexicographers combine historical reading techniques with modern corpora to track language in the wild.
Samuel Johnson established the foundational citation-gathering system in 1755 by reading literature, underlining words of interest, and having assistants copy passages onto slips of paper filed alphabetically. Noah Webster adopted this approach in his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. You can trace this manual process of extracting quotations through later reference projects. Samuel Johnson relied on works by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Locke, and Pope, alongside mundane texts on fossils, medical research, and legal writing to compile his dictionary.
Reading and marking is a core lexicographical skill that requires unlearning passive reading habits to spot subtle shifts in grammar, compound structures, and vocabulary without getting distracted by narrative drama. During training at Merriam-Webster, new editors practiced on Entertainment Weekly articles under the guidance of senior editors like Steve Perrault to learn what language to mark and what to ignore. You must follow a strict physical process during text analysis:
- Read a text and remain on the lookout for a word that catches your eye
- Underline the marked word
- Bracket enough of the context around the word so a future definer can determine its usage and meaning
- Put a check in the margin next to the marked word so typists can locate it
- Repeat until you have nothing else to read
Corpora provide searchable databases of hundreds of millions of words, allowing you to easily track regional dialects and specialized language across diverse formats. Computer corpora supply massive amounts of data from sci-fi novels, transcripts, zines, and regional newspapers. They cannot fully replace human intuition in interpreting whether a word has genuinely settled into mainstream usage. The online dictionary start-up Wordnik launched a fund-raising campaign in 2015 to document a million missing words by using data analytics to find glossed words and trigger texts online.
Although dictionaries rely heavily on written texts, spoken language is the primary driver of language transmission and new word creation. Peaches Monroee created a six-second video in June 2014 coining the term on fleek, which resulted in nearly 10 percent of all global Google searches by November. You must balance surface-level internet slang and ultra-rare historical anomalies when selecting sources to build a representative sample of a language. Chasing fleeting internet buzzwords like mansplain or spending weeks investigating archaic ecclesiastical sects like Anabaptist abecedarians yields diminishing returns.
5. Defining Principles and Workflow
Lexicographers do not attempt to capture the essential, philosophical nature of things through real defining, but instead focus on lexical defining by describing how a word is actually used in context. Philosophy and theology attempt to answer essential questions about abstract concepts like love or truth, but bad lexicography tries to do the same. You study usage data clusters to explain what a word means in a particular setting.
Budding lexicographers enter the field imagining they will define the philosophical essence of love, only to discover that dictionaries must account for diverse real-world uses, ranging from emotional affection to saying one loves pizza.
For a word to merit entry into a general dictionary, it must satisfy three rigorous criteria: widespread use in print, a sustained shelf life, and meaningful use. You evaluate whether a word appears across multiple diverse publications rather than a single niche source, whether it demonstrates staying power despite rapid language growth, and whether it carries actual semantic meaning rather than serving as a mere placeholder or puzzle curiosity.
The massive word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is entered in the dictionary but lacks meaningful use because it mostly appears in lists of long words rather than running prose.
Merriam-Webster editors rely on strict in-house style guides known as the Black Books, which dictate the precise mechanics, punctuation, and typography of dictionary entries. Conceived by former editor in chief Philip Babcock Gove for Webster's Third, these black clothbound binders contain meticulous memos specifying formatting rules down to where spaces are permitted within a definition.
Philip Babcock Gove wrote a thirty-three-page memo titled Punctuation and Typography of Vocabulary Entries that regulates the structural layout of every dictionary entry.
Traditional dictionary publishers never begin writing a dictionary at the letter A, opting instead to start mid-alphabet to allow editors time to settle into the style guide. Starting around letters like H or K provides editors practice before compiling the early letters. Historically, this practice also ensured that the heavily scrutinized A through D sections benefited from a refined and mature editorial style.
Sixteenth-century lexicographer Thomas Elyot described starting in A, pausing to figure out defining, and restarting at M before returning to the first letter.
The letter S is the longest and most difficult letter in the English alphabet for lexicographers to compile, making up more than a tenth of the entire dictionary. While letters vary significantly in length and thematic difficulty, the letter S accounts for a massive percentage of dictionary entries and requires immense endurance.
Exactly 11 percent of a standard dictionary is composed of words beginning with the letter S.
Writing analytical definitions requires strict house styles and rigorous multi-stage reviews.
Analytical definitions consist of a broad category called a genus combined with specific descriptors called differentiae that distinguish the headword from all other members of that category. The genus term must be placed in the smallest possible category that can contain the word without being overly broad. Differentiae then provide the necessary restrictive clauses to isolate the precise meaning.
When defining surfboard, editors must choose the genus board rather than the overly broad piece or restrictive plank, and then add differentiae like long, narrow, and buoyant used for surfing.
Lexicographers use parenthetical adjuncts and qualifying hedges to accommodate changing material realities without committing definitions to absolute, inflexible lists. Words like especially, specifically, or parenthetical lists introduced by as allow dictionaries to mention common examples of a range while keeping the definition open to future technological innovations.
Defining a surfboard as a board made as of wood, fiberglass, or foam ensures the definition remains accurate even if manufacturers invent a new polymer material in the future.
Every dictionary entry undergoes a multi-layered review process involving numerous specialized editors and multiple editorial passes before publication. Entries pass through definers, copy editors, cross-reference editors, etymologists, dating editors, pronunciation editors, final readers, and proofreaders to ensure consistency and precision under tight production schedules.
When revising the Collegiate Dictionary Eleventh Edition, a staff of about twenty editors had to review roughly 220,000 definitions, write 10,000 new ones, and make over 100,000 changes in an eighteen-month timeframe.
Lexicographers generally fall into two distinct psychological categories when writing definitions: lumpers, who write broad definitions covering multiple variations, and splitters, who create discrete definitions for minor nuances. These tendencies reflect natural inclinations in how definers handle semantic spectra. Lumpers struggle to separate micro-meanings, whereas splitters find it difficult to collapse concise distinctions into a single entry.
An anonymous lumper notoriously defined fishstick simply as a stick of fish, while a splitter wrote an exhaustive, sprawling definition of hotel detailing dancing compartments and travel tickets.
6. Pragmatic Word Overhauls
High-frequency function words and neutral examples require immense mental endurance to sort.
Dictionary example sentences must illustrate common usage, use only words entered in that dictionary, and be as boring as possible. Lexicographers avoid creative or narrative-driven examples because readers look to dictionaries for objective definitions rather than entertainment. Every sentence is carefully weighed against the definition to ensure the example does not overshadow the headword.
Stamper cites the definition of portly featuring a descriptive fragment that evokes a grand dame, which Gove would have trimmed for being too narrative.
Verbal illustrations must be meticulously scrubbed of names, double entendres, pronouns, and political tones to prevent reader complaints. Because readers scrutinize dictionaries for perceived biases or hidden jokes, lexicographers remove proper names, double meanings, and controversial political or gendered phrasing to remain completely neutral.
Using a name like Larry in an example can prompt outraged responses from a reader who recently broke up with a Larry.
Small, common words are significantly harder to define and handle in lexicography than long or rare words. While rare words like schadenfreude are semantically clear, highly frequent words like take, make, or go possess numerous semantically drippy and oozy uses that require extensive sorting and structural overhaul. Stamper received two boxes containing citations exclusively for the single word take.
Working with paper citations requires manually sorting thousands of index cards by part of speech before any defining work can begin. Lexicographers handling extensive historical word batches must physically sort hundreds or thousands of citations into piles representing existing definitions or potential new senses before drafting entries.
Stamper spent five hours sorting just the first box of citations for the verb take. Each citation box measures sixteen inches long, and the single word take required two boxes of citations.
Rigorous analysis of extensive citation files can reveal previously unrecorded semantic nuances in basic words. Senior editors combing through citations for function words or basic parts of speech can tease out finer, distinct meanings that expand the dictionary's record of how language operates.
Emily Brewster discovered a new sense of the indefinite article a during her overhaul for the Eleventh edition.
Overhauling massive entries pushes lexicographers to a mental breaking point known as the Wall. The intense cognitive load of categorizing hundreds of subsenses and idioms for common verbs causes editors to experience mental fatigue, disorientation, and exhaustion. The verb take ultimately accumulated 107 distinct senses, subsenses, and defined phrases, requiring a month of nonstop editorial work to finish take. Peter Gilliver spent nine months to revise run for the OED.
Stamper panicked when the cleaning crew moved her floor piles of citations into a cascade on her chair, leading her to question her grasp of English.
7. Taboo Language and Reclamation
Lexicographers treat vulgarities with clinical objectivity while navigating sensitive social realities.
Once words enter the dictionary office, you strip away personal discomfort to record written uses objectively. Taboo language has been documented since the earliest English dictionaries. A professional lexicographer maintains an unrufflable attitude toward profane entries as part of standard job requirements.
John Florio used the verb "fuck" in his 1598 translations of Italian. Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster initially refused to enter low language due to aesthetics or moral impropriety.
The word "bitch" originated around 1000 to denote a female dog before acquiring human-centric senses. The single-mindedness of a dog in heat likely inspired the extended meaning of a lewd woman around 1400. An early citation from around 1400 uses the phrase "thou bitch black as coal", and Shakespeare used the dog sense of the word in Merry Wives of Windsor.
Samuel Johnson published his groundbreaking Dictionary in 1755, breaking the mold of previous lexicographers. Instead of a direct analytical definition, he defined it as a name of reproach for a woman.
Francis Grose published A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785. He took midnight strolls with his assistant Tom Cocking through London docks and taverns to collect slang directly from ordinary people.
Linguistic reclamation is a process where maligned groups take an inflammatory slur and use it as an identity marker of pride. Jo Freeman published The BITCH Manifesto in 1970 during second-wave feminism to encourage women to reclaim the word. Gay activist groups in the 1990s reclaimed queer, which still drew sharp opposition from older generations who remembered its medical and abusive history.
Dictionary definitions of sensitive words undergo intense internal editorial debates across decades. Associate editor Mairé Weir Kay overhauled the definition in the 1961 Webster's Third New International. Lexicographer Jane Solomon faced editorial resistance regarding the definition of microaggression when her editor altered it to soften the impact of offensive behavior.
8. Etymology and Dating
Etymologists master language morphology, phonology, and history as a whole. They work backward from the earliest Modern English uses to reconstruct word lineages.
Etymologists reconstruct word lineages while usage myths and dating projects correct popular illusions.
Jim Rader, an etymologist at Merriam-Webster, dug into obscure manuscripts of Pliny’s Historia naturalis. He discovered that the rare animal word chaus stemmed from a medieval misreading of chaum where the letters ma were misread as um.
People frequently invent elaborate acronymic origins for common words. The persistent myth that posh originated from luxury cabin ticket stamps on P&O ships traveling between England and India has zero written evidence in nineteenth-century literature.
Historical dictionaries include dates in parentheses to indicate the first recorded instance of a word's use in print with a specific meaning. Initiated at Merriam-Webster in the 1980s under president Bill Llewellyn, the dating project required combing through the OED and internal citation files. Daters face a 15-minute average time limit to research any given entry across 65 listed sources in a reference spreadsheet.
- The dating project was completed in 1983 in time for the Ninth Collegiate dictionary.
- The etymological fallacy assumes that a word's original meaning is its only correct modern use.
- Richard Grant White in the late nineteenth century attacked the extended slaughter meaning of decimate.
- The literal and extended senses of decimate lived side by side without complaint for two hundred years.
- In the early 2000s, 58 percent of the AHD Usage Panel restricted dilemma to two options based on its di- root.
- The 2005 AHD Usage Panel showed that 81 percent accepted the extended sense of decimate referring to widespread death.
- The recency illusion is the mistaken belief that linguistic features perceived as new are recent modern innovations.
- John Gower used the clipped word hap for happening in his Confessio Amantis in the late fourteenth century.
- OMG was first used in private correspondence to Winston Churchill in 1917.
- Following the descriptive approach of Webster's Third in 1961, James Parton created a Usage Panel to maintain prescriptive standards.
10 Key Ideas
- Dictionary publishers operate in modest environments on glacial multi-year timelines.
- Grammatical categories are fluid and descriptive rather than rigid and prescriptive.
- Dictionaries record language usage rather than dictate it, even when users demand gatekeeping.
- Lexicographers combine historical reading techniques with modern corpora to track language in the wild.
- Writing analytical definitions requires strict house styles and rigorous multi-stage reviews.
- High-frequency function words and neutral examples require immense mental endurance to sort.
- Lexicographers treat vulgarities with clinical objectivity while navigating sensitive social realities.
- Etymologists reconstruct word lineages while usage myths and dating projects correct popular illusions.
- Pronunciation editors meticulously determine standard spoken variations alongside written definitions.
- Dictionaries are human-driven reference tools that mirror the fluid reality of language rather than infallible authorities of proper English.