Lexicography 2.0: Reimagining Dictionaries for the Digital Age

On November 4, 2012, Macmillan Education announced that it would cease publishing print dictionaries and that Macmillan Dictionaries would henceforth live only online. The announcement was hardly a sorrowful one: an upbeat press release framed the move as “a cause for celebration,” and an accompanying video sunnily declared, “The Macmillan Dictionary is going places.” Editor-in-chief Michael Rundell contrasted Macmillan’s decision with that of an equivalent move in the world of magazine journalism, the final print issue of Newsweek (before it was revived more than a year later). “Newsweek’s announcement was tinged with regret,” Rundell wrote, quoting Newsweek’s press release: “‘Exiting print is a difficult moment for all of us.’ … But at Macmillan, we take the opposite view: exiting print is a moment of liberation, because at last our dictionaries have found their ideal medium” (Rundell 2012a).

The reaction was mixed on lexicography mailing lists. “What a sad day,” despaired Dan Pratt, a retired Defense Department mathematician and linguistics PhD whose personal mission has been an overhaul of the official dictionary used in Scrabble tournaments (Fatsis 2011). “When looking up anything in a print dictionary, you generally stumble across all sorts of delightful material you never would have known to look for,” Pratt wrote. “With an electronic dictionary, generally speaking, what you search is what you get, and nothing beyond.” Adam Kilgarriff, whose company, Lexical Computing Ltd., develops corpus tools for dictionary publishers, countered Pratt’s perspective, calling it “a day of liberation from the straitjacket of print” (Kilgarriff 2012). In their talk of “liberation,” Kilgarriff and Rundell were echoing their like-minded colleague Sue Atkins, who as early as 1996 said of electronic dictionaries, “At last we are liberated from the straitjacket of the printed page and alphabetical order” (Atkins 1996, 516).

Whether one views such developments as positive, negative, or a mixture of both, there is a growing consensus among lexical reference publishers that the move away from print is an inevitable one. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have yet to make an announcement as drastic as Macmillan’s, but even the suggestion that the OED might no longer publish a print edition has caused consternation in both the British and American press in recent years (Heffernan 2008, Mount 2010, Flanagan 2014). Though the OED’s official line is that “no decision has yet been made” about the ultimate format of the edition currently in revision, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which the dwindling market for print dictionaries could support the publication of the third edition (in 40 or so volumes) when the work is finally completed a decade or two hence.

What is gained and what is lost in the shift from page to pixel? Here I argue that the digital transformation of dictionaries and thesauruses provides fresh opportunities for lexicographers to engage with generations coming of age in the electronic era. I will survey some of the latest advances in the field, with an eye to making electronically based dictionaries and thesauruses maximally useful to a twenty-first-century readership.

While there are many reasons to be hopeful in the new digital landscape for lexical reference, such optimism needs to be tempered by an understanding of how electronic formats for dictionaries and thesauruses are still a work in progress, with many growing pains along the way. Rundell, the Macmillan editor, provided a more even-handed perspective in his contribution to the 2012 edited volume, Electronic Lexicography. He observes that for advanced learner’s dictionaries (ALDs) of the type that have been published by Macmillan, users tend to be in the age range of 17–24 and as such are “digital natives” who “routinely go to the Web for information of any kind, and generally expect to get it for nothing” (Rundell 2012b). This chimes with an earlier study by Muffy Siegel (2007) on the use of online dictionaries by American undergraduates.

Writing before Macmillan had made its decision to abandon the print market, Rundell allowed that “for the time being there remains a residual market for ALDs in print form, mainly in places...