Working Knowledge

WORKING KNOWLEDGE Wl forking Knowledge, just like the preceding section Reference Works in Progress, is a new feature of Didionaries. It is designed to provide a dynamic forum for the thoughts of experts on a particular problem encountered in lexicographic practice — hence the tide Working Knowledge. The comments in this new section are meant to be free-ranging. The goal of Working Knowledge is to allow those who have spent much time and effort on dictionaries and other reference works to have a site for the focused discussion of critical, on-going issues and aspects of daily practice. For this very first instance of Working Knowledge, I asked a number of people in the field to discuss what diey saw as really hardproblems in lexicography — die kind of problems that recur and beg for solutions but remain relendessly tough nuts to crack. What follows are the dioughts of eight of our colleagues on the hard problems of pronunciation keys, alpha listing, quotations as not-easily-categorized phenomena, getting odiers to understand the functions and use of a dictionary, citations and the definition of abstract nouns, the effort-results tradeoff in Internet use for citations, quotation choice in specialized glossaries, and navigation of senses in polysemous entries. I have no doubt that these are classic hard problems because almost all of them surface in the main papers to the volume and die reviews, as well as here. Suggestions for future Working Knowledge forums are encouraged. — WF Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Soäety ofNorth America 27 (2006) ...