How are dictionaries made?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
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
Nowadays, virtually all dictionaries are built by whole teams of talented people. For each new dictionary, and each new edition of an existing dictionary, they collect huge amounts of written and spoken language, and sift them for evidence on how language is being used.