Dictionaries by Nancy L. Eady

 Last week, I was writing a brief and wanted to use the definition of a particular word to prove a point. I don't quote from a dictionary with most briefs.  Judges give more weight to binding precedent, such as opinions from the appellate courts over them, than to definitions from a dictionary, even one as venerated as Black's Legal Dictionary But some words are so basic or have so many meanings that only a legal dictionary will do. If I’m lucky, the definition I want will be either the first or second definition. 

In my non-professional life, I use a regular dictionary.  While I have an extensive vocabulary, I still can encounter unfamiliar words. A few years ago, I looked up “crepuscular,” which occurs a few times in the Pern science fiction series written by Anne McCaffrey. It is an adjective, meaning “resembling or relating to twilight.” Soanes, Catherine & Stevenson, Angus, Oxford Dictionary of English, 2d Edition Revised (Oxford University Press, 2009). The sentence I read included the phrase “in the crepuscular light of dawn,” so it made sense.

I never really thought about the history of dictionaries. If asked, I had the vague idea that Noah Webster invented them, and most dictionaries in existence today, at least in America, are descended from his. I was wrong. According to Wikipedia—what, you expected me to do some type of serious research? — the first known dictionaries were written around 2300 B.C. on cuneiform tablets and were a sort of “Sumerian-Akkadian” word list, kind of like we might use an English-Spanish dictionary today. These word lists did not contain definitions, per se, but just showed the corresponding words in Sumerian and Akkadian, like listing “cat” next to “gato” on an English-Spanish word list.

Of course, that world view of dictionaries did not fit in well with the existence of the Oxford English Dictionary, an ongoing massive effort to provide the “meaning, history and usage of over 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world.”   https://www.oed.com/?tl=true.  For a few years, I received emails with the OED “word of the day,” which was a great tool for expanding my vocabulary, but for some reason, I stopped getting them.  If you need to use the OED, many libraries have a subscription. If you are a really motivated lexicographer, you can buy your own subscription.  As of today, a personal annual subscription to the OED is $ 29.95 a month, or $100 a year. 

People who write dictionaries are called “lexicographers.” They have their work cut out for them. Can you imagine trying to describe the definition of such everyday words as “go,” “at” or “the”? In my limited experience, the longer the word, the more descriptive it is, such as “crepuscular” versus “dim light,” but the more likely it is that the reader won’t know the word, either, which pulls them out of the story. Tracing the history (“etymology”) of a word takes a lot of work, too. Again according to Wikipedia, Noah Webster learned 26 languages, among them Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Old English, and Arabic, to help him evaluate words’ etymologies.

So, while we authors play with our words, let’s give a shout out to the lexicographers of the English language who accomplish the arduous task of defining the words with which we play.