Abstract

Dictionaries publish disclaimers on their copyright pages asserting that their entries (or absence of entries) are not intended to make any legal claims about trademarks, yet courts of law nonetheless regularly treat dictionary entries as probative. The dictionary makers are just trying to avoid contentious confrontation with lawyers, but in fact the lexicographers are largely correct and the courts are somewhat naive: because of their scope and brevity, dictionary entries are suitable only as a small starting place for the understanding of words in a legal context. Even so, the methodology of lexicographical inquiry can be highly relevant for the generation of semantic and pragmatic analyses that can be of assistance to litigator, judge, and jury. When linguists trained in lexicography prepare in-depth reports and testimony, they compensate for the necessary insufficiencies of dictionaries consulted alone. For example, the thin treatment of similative compounds—such as whisper-quiet—in all English-language dictionaries may be overcome in a trademark case by a detailed examination of the data of actual use of the terms, which a dictionary maker cannot do owing to lack of time, resources, and the traditional objectives of word-book writing. The results of a lexicographical inquiry in a legal context also can be of independent linguistic interest, for example, in the provenience and history of whisper-quiet in its own right and perhaps in pointing the way towards the future regularization of dictionaries’ treatment of similative compounds.

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