The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
62. How are Dictionaries Made?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Erin McKean [+]
Wordnik
Erin McKean is the founder of the non-profit online dictionary Wordnik. Previously she was the Editor in Chief of U.S. Dictionaries for Oxford University Press and the Editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly. She is also the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That's Amore (also about words), as well as two books about dresses (the novel The Secret Lives of Dresses and The Hundred Dresses, a field guide to dress archetypes). She has a B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, where she wrote her M.A. thesis on the treatment of phrasal verbs (verbs like ‘act up’, ‘act out’, and, of course, ‘look up’) in children’s dictionaries. She lives in California. Please send her evidence of new words you’ve found, by e-mail, to [email protected].
Description
Modern dictionaries are built by teams of talented people relying on evidence found in huge collections of written and spoken language. Traditional dictionaries rely more on editors and online dictionaries more on crowdsourcing and machine learning, but both have the same goal: to describe what words mean and how they are used.