Editorial

This 37th issue of Dictionaries offers both traditional scholarship and scholarship that blends the traditional with a computational approach to the billions of words accessible to lexicographers on the World Wide Web. Several contributors appear in the journal’s pages for the first time, while among past contributors are two former DSNA presidents, one of whom also edited the journal. Two of the contributions originated as presentations at the Society’s 20th biennial meeting in 2015 in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Two other papers from that conference appeared in the 2015 issue.) Contributors are residents of Canada, Finland, France, Spain, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, and the US.

Authors offer three proposals for new or modified approaches to aspects of lexicography, including color term definitions, the treatment of flora, and regional labeling. Krista Williams examines how a handful each of French and English monolingual dictionaries treat color terms, and she identifies three defining strategies that constitute a typology for color term entries.

Yasmin Baksh-Comeau, curator of the National Herbarium of Trinidad and Tobago, joins Lise Winer, author of the Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago, in recommending that cooperation between botanists and lexicographers would enhance dictionary entries for flora, a matter of more than linguistic importance, among other reasons because herbal medicine is becoming increasingly widespread.

In 2012, Stefan Dollinger, Laurel Brinton, and Margery Fee contributed a report to the journal on progress toward a second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. In this issue, Dollinger describes a methodology used in preparing DCHP-2 that significantly enhances regional labeling success. The method combines heuristically delimited Web searches using commercial search engines with more philological-humanistic approaches.

From its earliest years the journal has published articles on the history of lexicography. In this issue, Traci Nagle furthers our understanding of the OED’s quotations for Anglo-Indian words. She asks why James Murray did not acknowledge contributions from Henry Yule’s Hobson-Jobson until the second fascicle appeared. Something of a lexicographical whodunit, her exploration and conclusions constitute a neat bit of detective work that will interest NED/OED admirers.

Javier Ruano-García, continuing his explorations of English regionalisms from the Late Modern English period, analyzes a folio manuscript resident in the British Library and lays out in detail what Sarah Sophia Banks reported in a glossary of Norwich words, some of which were overlooked in Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary. Besides affording a window into eighteenth-century amateur lexicography, the article adds to our understanding of women’s contributions to dialect study.

In Reference Works in Progress, director of Oxford Global Languages Judy Pearsall describes a project to furnish digital lexical resources for one hundred of the world’s underrepresented languages, including progress to date and what lies ahead in an undertaking unmatched in breadth and ambition.

“Scholars read boring and mediocre books,” Michael Adams remarks in the opening to the reviews section, but John Considine’s Academy Dictionaries isn’t one of them. Reading it gave Adams “intellectual satisfaction and a humane connection to the subject,” and reading his and other reviews here will inform and delight. Robert DeMaria, Jr., in his review of You Could Look It Up, says Jack Lynch “pulls off the extraordinary trick of speaking agreeably and knowledgeably about an enormous number of subjects” and that readers might view the book as “a romp through the annals of reference books.” Geoffrey Williams reviews Theory and Practice of Specialised Online Dictionaries, edited by Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Sven Tarp, and finds that it “makes many very worthy points and [that] it is important to defend special-language lexicography against a dominant terminological outlook that seems to utterly ignore both users and word meanings.” Although “[s]pecialized lexicography needs its champions,” he writes, “this book is too often a diatribe, tilting at lexicographical windmills.” Rod McConchie notes in his review of Word Formation and Transparency in Medical English, edited by Renáta Panacová and Pius ten Hacken, that “more scholarly attention … to medico-linguistics” is needed and that this collection is “a promising contribution.” Janet DeCesaris recommends Christian Kay and Kathryn L. Allan...