Dictionaries

DICTIONARIES

DICTIONARIES. In the colonial era, Americans used British dictionaries. While dictionaries were published in the colonies during the late eighteenth century, nearly all of them were based on the famous 1755 lexicon compiled by Samuel Johnson in London. Dictionaries of the English language were not widely used until the early nineteenth century, when the expansion of print culture and basic schooling moved the dictionary into countless homes and offices. Dictionaries came in various sizes but most popular was the "school dictionary," a book about as big as a contemporary pocket dictionary. The first dictionary compiled by an American was Samuel Johnson Jr.'s A School Dictionary, published in 1798. The author was no relation to the famed British lexicographer.

The first well-known American dictionary was Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. Webster is often thought of as a linguistic nationalist, but he was actually more of a linguistic reformer. He argued that English, both in Britain and the United States, should follow "rational" rules. He introduced a system to reform English spelling and make it more uniform. He also devised an elaborate etymological system, based on his own research. This etymology won almost no acceptance at the time and remains universally discredited. Webster's faith in the rational reform of language contradicted the traditional commitment of the Anglo-American lexicography to use dictionaries to record refined usage.

Joseph Worcester, a Boston lexicographer, published a competing dictionary in 1846, three years after Webster died. A new edition of Webster's dictionary appeared the next year, published by the Merriam-Webster Company. These publications set off the "dictionary wars" of the 1840s and 1850s. Educators, editors, literary people, and even politicians all took sides, debating linguistics and hurling insults. Webster's publishers won the war in the 1860s by making their dictionary more conventional. The strange spellings and etymologies disappeared—Webster's dictionary now recorded refined contemporary usage.

Dictionary-making took a new turn after the Civil War (1861–1865). Lexicographers started adding thousands of slang and technical terms to major dictionaries as well as recording the history of words. They began to quote from newspapers as well as literature. Current re-fined usage was no longer the only principle of selection. These lexicographers also started recording national and regional variations of the language. In 1890, the Merriam-Webster Company renamed its flagship text Webster's International Dictionary. These dictionaries became huge, the largest of them becoming multivolume. The most famous of these "encyclopedic" dictionaries was British, the Oxford English Dictionary, edited by James A. H. Murray. Compilation on that dictionary began in the 1860s. An American text, The Century Dictionary of the English Language, edited by the Yale philologist William Dwight Whitney, is unknown today but was a competitor of the Oxford dictionary at the time. Whitney's was the first dictionary in the United States to enthusiastically include slang. Despite some opposition from conservatives opposed to slang and newspaper quotations, the new encyclopedic dictionary quickly became the standard form for the major dictionaries of the English language.

As the comprehensive dictionaries became huge, a new format was needed to accommodate most day-to-day use. In 1898, the Merriam-Webster Company published the first "collegiate" dictionary. Neatly packed into one manageable volume, this became the most popular dictionary of the next century, found as often in the home or office as in a college dorm room. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary dominated the first half of the century; Random House's American College Dictionary, first published in 1947, was most popular in the second half. In the 1990s, 2 million collegiate dictionaries were sold each year. The only other format that rivaled its popularity was the paperback pocket dictionary, introduced in the 1950s.

The 1961 publication of Webster's Third New International Dictionary served as a flash point for new debates about informality and slang. Philip Gove, the editor of the new Webster's, streamlined definitions and tried to eliminate overbearing editorializing. Academics, journalists, and literary people all over the country quickly took sides for or against the book. As during the dictionary war of the 1850s, the debate was intense, with linguistics and invective freely mixing. One particularly charged argument was over Webster's entry for "ain't." Critics claimed that Webster's Third sanctioned its use. Gove countered that the entry reflected the way people really talked. In general, critics argued that the new dictionary abandoned any meaningful effort to distinguish good English from bad English. Dictionaries, defenders argued, were supposed to describe the language, not regulate it.

The early 1960s debate over Webster's Third was really part of a larger discussion about the merits or demerits of progressive education. Controversy about progressive methods of schooling became particularly intense in the years after 1957, when the Soviet Union put a satellite in outer space and took the lead—for the moment—in the space race. There was widespread concern that soft, progressive methods in schools had put the United States behind in the Cold War. Critics of Webster's Third echoed arguments then being made against "progressive" methods of teaching English.

Despite the criticism, Webster's Third was a commercial success. Later in the decade, two other dictionaries appeared that became popular competitors. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966) and the American Heritage Dictionary (1969) were both conservative alternatives to Webster's. The American Heritage, a collegiate dictionary, was immediately popular and remained so through the end of the century. It created a "usage panel" of 105 leading writers, editors, and professors to give advice about good and bad English. A number of its members had been vocal critics of Webster's Third.

In the 1990s, dictionary makers became preoccupied with going electronic. The Random House Dictionary and Encarta World English Dictionary were the first to become available on CD-ROM. The Oxford English Dictionary started working on an online version in 1994; it became commercially available in 2000, being licensed to libraries for a fee. The electronic emphasis promises to turn future dictionaries into multimedia works, with pronunciations spoken instead of written, routine links to encyclopedia entries, and lexicons updated constantly instead of having a single new edition compiled every generation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Friend, Joseph. The Development of American Lexicography, 1798–1864. The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1967.

Landau, Sidney. Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. 2d ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Kenneth Cmiel

See also English Language ; Linguistics .