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.
