The Dictionary Revolution

A worn dictionary is usually a good sign – an indicator that it is getting plenty of use. But with the recent revolution in dictionary development and design, it may also mean that your copy is out of date.

Computer technology has changed just about every aspect of modern life, so why not dictionaries? Why not indeed!

In this age of rapidly changing technology, replacing an outmoded computer, upgrading a piece of software or even buying a new car are routine practices. Perhaps it’s time to add your aging English-language dictionary to the list.

The field of lexicography – the art and science of writing dictionaries – has undergone vast changes in the past twenty years. Defining words used to be largely a matter of introspection. Today, lexicographers have almost instant access to thousands of examples of words in the context of actual real-life written and spoken communication.

The reason, of course, is the availability of lightning-fast computers, sophisticated software, vast collections of written and spoken texts in digital form and almost infinite amounts electronic storage space to hold them.

Interestingly, the dictionaries that have benefited the most from the revolution in technology and methodology are those produced for non-native speakers of English. Unlike dictionaries for native speakers which focus almost entirely on meaning, "learners’ dictionaries", as they are normally called, provide considerable information on how to use words as well.

Insights

With the current technology, new insights into the English language are a regular occurrence, even for a seasoned lexicographer like Gwyneth Fox, the project manager for the division of Macmillan Publishers which produces its learners’ dictionaries. As a recent example, she tells a short story about a Polish friend of hers who speaks very good English.

"He wrote to me one day ‘As you know Gwyneth, I’m averse to cigarettes.’ And I read it and I thought, yes, that’s right, he doesn’t like – and then I stopped and thought that sounds funny to me. So I went and looked at the corpus data and discovered that every single example we had, was ‘not averse to’.

Her search, she says, only took a matter of seconds. "It’s very very easy. Once you’ve got your corpus, however big it is, all you literally do is type in the word ‘averse’ and press ‘return’. What you get is called a concordance and the word ‘averse’ is in the middle and the context it’s being used in is on either side. So you’ve got your word ‘averse’ down the middle and you look to the left and all you see is ‘not’ or ‘n’t’. So it’s terribly, terribly easy."

Of course, as a native speaker, Fox already knew intuitively how to use ‘averse’. The check of the corpus merely confirmed her suspicions. As a lexicographer, however, she immediately recognised that this is exactly the type of information her Polish friend would need in a dictionary aimed at non-native speakers. Supplying such usage information is indeed one of the important aspects which sets learners’ dictionaries apart from standard dictionaries.

Idioms are rare

One significant and almost counterintuitive finding from corpus research is the rarity of idioms in both written and spoken English.

"They are much much rarer than you think,’’ says Fox. "At Cobuild at one point we were writing a dictionary of idioms. I was reading the text and I came to the letter ‘r’. I think every learner in the world knows ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’. It wasn’t there and it was because we didn’t have any examples.

"I said to the person who was editing it, You can’t have a dictionary of idioms without ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ for learners, because every learner in the world knows it. And she said, I can’t put it in. And I said you’ve got to go find some examples. We were lucky, because the Internet had kind of just started really and we could find a few on the Internet. So it crept in like that."

Bi-lingual dictionaries

While learner’s dictionaries clearly get the nod over standard dictionaries for non-native speakers, is there still a place for the ever-popular bi-lingual dictionaries?

Yes, there is, says Fox, particularly if you simply need to know what a word means.

"If you look up a word like ‘daffodil’(in a learners’ dictionary), it will say something like ‘a yellow flower which flowers in the springtime’. But then, there are other yellow flowers that flower in the springtime. That’s where a bilingual dictionary would be useful because there’s a one-to-one equivalent there. But if there was something interesting about the way ‘daffodil’ was used, then that’s what the learners’ dictionary would say."

A word of caution, however: "The problem with bilingual dictionaries," says Fox, "particularly the small ones is that they give you a list of different meanings and it’s really difficult for a learner to work out which is the translation they need."

The future

Looking to the future, Fox says she and her team at Macmillan are eager to develop and refine the learners’ corpus they have been working on. "It shows us the words that learners use and it shows us the mistakes that learners typically make, she explains."

This project, together with the continual expansion and analysis of the main corpus promises to keep her very busy. "There’s more than enough to keep me going for my lifetime," she concludes.

This is an edited version of an article first published by the Bangkok Post