Digital Dictionaries: Introduction

In 1900 James A. H. Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, pointed out that before there were print dictionaries there were interlinear glosses in medieval manuscripts, which were put there by readers to explain the occasional hard word (1900, 7–9).¹ Sometimes manuscript glossaries would be compiled from individual glosses, abstracting words and their senses from particular uses in writing. Sometimes they would be organized into alphabetical lists, further abstracting a word from an instance of its use. After the invention of printing, similar glossaries began to appear in print—largely derived not from manuscript annotations but directly from books that were themselves printed—and the codex dictionary began its long career, which has now spanned more than four centuries.

It seems that that career is now nearing an end. At the start of each semester I ask my students what dictionaries they generally consult, and few name a printed dictionary. Webster does get mentioned, ambiguously; occasionally Merriam-Webster, and even the Oxford English Dictionary—but the latter two are available online and are often consulted online. By far the most popular answer is Dictionary.com. Free Online Dictionary gets mentioned. Google is very popular: more broadly, as one student put it, “whatever comes up in a search.”

Of course, what comes up in a search may not be a dictionary definition but a Wikipedia article about something in the world. The principled distinction between a dictionary definition of a word and an encyclopedia article about a thing, a distinction that Dean Trench (1857, 45–51) insisted on as he prepared the ground for the New English Dictionary and that is still honored, more or less, by the editors of its successor the Oxford English Dictionary, tends to get lost in the convenience of Search.² Semantic precision, too, is at risk in that convenient free-for-all.

And even Search may prove to be a transitional, cumbersome way of looking up the meaning of a word. Reading a web page on my computer I highlight the word butterfly and a small window pops up, containing the definition, “An insect with two pairs of large wings that are covered with tiny scales, usually brightly colored, and typically held erect when at rest. Butterflies fly by day, have clubbed or dilated antennae, and usually feed on nectar.” The proximate source for that definition is Google Dictionary—because I, like more than 1.6 million other people, have installed Google Dictionary as an extension in my Chrome web browser. The ultimate source is a database provided by Oxford University Press: the Google Dictionary definition of butterfly currently matches that in the New Oxford American Dictionary.³ Questions of authority and genealogy aside, what is most remarkable about this definition is its immediate availability: a word-keyed pop-up that is as ready-to-hand as a medieval interlinear gloss. Reversing what Murray called the evolution of English lexicography, the codex dictionary has been atomized back into responses to lexical prompts. No doubt the medieval glossator was more text- and context-sensitive—more utterance-alert—than is the generic glossing apparatus of the present day. Still the gloss, immediately responsive to the text, has displaced the imposing, bulky book of the dictionary.

It was an awareness of such a shift from books to bits that prompted the Lexicography Discussion Group of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) to organize a panel titled “Digital Dictionaries” for the annual meeting held in Boston in January 2013.⁴ Three experts in the recent evolution of dictionaries presented versions of the articles that follow below, and a specialist in the long history of dictionaries, Lisa Berglund, provided commentary.

Given the digital interests of all concerned, it was fitting that the proceedings should be live-tweeted by more than half a dozen members of the audience, reporting the gist of the several presentations.⁵ Some of these tweets caught the attention of Jennifer Howard, who interviewed the participants and reported the results in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Howard 2013)—which, of course, is available online, digitally.