A day in the life of a 21st century  lexicographer
by Liz Potter

As is well known, the great Doctor Samuel Johnson was not greatly enamoured of lexicography: in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) he described a lexicographer as a ‘harmless drudge’ and lexicography as ‘dull work’. But how do we harmless drudges spend our working day in the 21st century, and what does this ‘dull work’ consist of in the age of computers and instant communication?

Past and present

A lexicographer's company

A typical day

Writing a dictionary

Machine or man?

Job satisfaction

Past and present

Over the past two decades, computers have changed the face of lexicography almost beyond recognition, although it could be argued that the essential nature of the work remains substantially what it was when Johnson was toiling away 250 years ago. Johnson explained the meanings of English words and phrases, and illustrated them with quotations drawn from the classic texts of English literature; the present day ELT lexicographer explains the meanings of English words and phrases, and illustrates them with examples drawn from an electronically held corpus of written and spoken texts of modern English. The tools of the trade may have changed from books, pens and index cards to computer hardware and editing software, but we are still engaged on essentially the same enterprise as Doctor Johnson: explaining and illustrating the meanings of English, for modest financial reward.

A lexicographer’s company

So how does a lexicographer spend a typical working day? Typically in solitude, with only a computer for company. These days many lexicographers work freelance from home. The days of large teams working in-house for reference publishers, which were the norm when I started in 1990, seem to have gone for ever. Improvements in computer hardware and software over the past decade have made it eminently practical for lexicographers to work mainly from home: many of us prefer it, and so do the publishers, because it saves them lots of money. Work is received and sent by email, or directly uploaded and downloaded from a central computer. The speed and capacity of modern PCs means that a sizeable corpus can be held and consulted with ease; if for any reason this is not practical, the corpus can be held on a central computer and consulted remotely.

A typical day

On a typical working day, I get up, have breakfast, sit down at my desk, and turn on my computer. The enthusiasm with which I do this depends on several factors, one of which is the particular project I am working on that morning. I normally work on two or three projects at any one time, and inevitably some inspire more enthusiasm than others. The nature of projects differs quite widely, and so do the different stages of a single project. So at different times I might be selecting headwords or other items for inclusion; compiling text from scratch; editing text compiled by other people; cutting compiled text to the requisite length; revising existing text or compiling new words for a new edition; cutting down an existing text to make a smaller dictionary. Other tasks are less directly editorial: devising policy and writing a brief for a particular aspect of a dictionary; revising a style guide; giving feedback to other lexicographers; checking the content or functionality of a dictionary on CD-ROM. Oh and there’s another essential component of the working day, which replaces the office coffee machine and water cooler: moaning (or occasionally enthusing) to colleagues (usually via email) about this or that aspect of a project, or the lexicographer’s life in general.

Writing a dictionary

The nitty-gritty of modern day ELT corpus lexicography consists of the compilation of dictionary entries in a computerised editing system, using an electronic corpus as evidence. If you are compiling text from scratch, as happened for the Macmillan English Dictionary, you receive a file of headwords to be compiled. These may or may not have had parts of speech already allocated to them; they may be accompanied by a batch of notes from other compilers about some aspects of some of your entries; in the case of the MED, there may also be a kind of pre-digested snapshot of the corpus evidence to help you decide which senses and patterns are important. Then comes the hard part: deciding and explaining, in accordance with the Style Guide and within the constraints of the defining vocabulary, what this word means, how it behaves, what contexts it is found in, what company it likes to keep with other words; and moulding this information into a coherent dictionary entry. The corpus is there to help: it gives you the evidence of how this word is used by real people in the language of today; it is also the source of examples that illustrate these patterns of use.

Machine or man?

Although those with little practical knowledge of lexicography like to claim that advances in software have made lexicography easier, and that dictionaries can be – or soon will be – produced ‘at the touch of a button’, this is nonsense. Advances in computer technology have speeded up the process of dictionary compilation; and in particular, the advent of large, easily consulted electronic corpora has given lexicographers the invaluable gift of objective evidence of usage that goes far beyond any individual’s knowledge of the language. But the business of lexicography – the process of identifying and explaining meaning – is as hard (or as easy) as it has ever been; and I have seen no evidence so far that machines can rival, let alone replace, human beings in this quintessentially human activity.

Job satisfaction

Each stage of a project tends to follow a familiar pattern: initial struggle (getting your head round a new piece of editing software, coping with the stream of instructions flowing from those in charge of the project); a burst of enthusiasm for the task in hand; followed by grinding labour as you plough through the amount of work allotted to you at each stage (dictionaries are long projects: even a small dictionary is a long book, and the full-sized learners’ dictionaries are sizeable tomes that take years to write). In a moment of frustration I once described lexicography as ‘serial tedium’, which is not to say that it doesn’t have its satisfactions. In the short term: writing a definition that satisfies you; finding the perfect example; finishing a long or tricky entry; leaving a run of text in a better state than you found it in. In the long term: contributing to the overall shape of a project; working – even remotely – with gifted and inspiring colleagues; seeing your name in the front of a book that will be used by hundreds of thousands of people. As a friend and lexicographic colleague once remarked, it beats packing frozen peas for a living.

Illustrations by Martin Shovel