Writing a dictionary

When I was about 12, I decided to write my own dictionary. I found a loose-leaf binder and patiently wrote dictionary entries on obscure words, which I stored in the binder. My dictionary never became very large and after a while I turned to making a football scrapbook like most other children of my age, but for a few months I put some effort in my attempt to outdo the Oxford English. You might imagine from this that I was showing a precocious interest in dictionary-making and an early aptitude for lexicography. Perhaps it was indeed an early sign of my interest in language, but it certainly did not reveal any early aptitude. Indeed almost every strategy I adopted for the creation of that dictionary was the wrong one for the job.

In the first place, I started with the most obscure words; early entries I remember writing were for widdershins, gyre, and perne. What I did not realize was that it is often possible to guess the meaning of rare words from their context and that they have in any case little impact on the overall intelligibility of what one is reading (and they will almost always occur in writing). It is, oddly, more likely to be the common words that cause the greater problems and over which a good dictionary has to take special care. The reason is that common words are often affected by the situation in which they are used, and they shift in meaning in subtle and unpredictable ways depending on the words they accompany. They are the kinds of words that you need to look up when they do not seem to have their normal meaning.