Editorial

Eight articles, one report of a reference work in progress, reviews of two books and two online dictionaries, and an obituary follow in this issue of Dictionaries. Contributors reside in Australia, Canada, Barbados, England, Germany, Italy, and the United States. Besides those contributors who are appearing in the journal's pages for the first time, familiar names, including two former presidents of the Dictionary Society of North America, have contributed to this issue. Some of the contributors—including several with an academic affiliation—are practicing lexicographers and bring that perspective and experience to their contributions. The six contributions in the forum originated as invited presentations in a seminar immediately preceding DSNA's 22nd biennial meeting, which took place in Bloomington, Indiana, in May of this year. Two other contributions—one article and the Reference Works in Progress contribution—also originated at the Bloomington biennial.

In "Shared Lexical Innovations in Australian and New Zealand English," Pam Peters, Adam Smith, and Tobias Bernaisch present evidence that the general trend in innovation in AusE and NZE is from west to east—from Australia to New Zealand—and they offer historical and socio-cultural explanations for that pattern. The paper by Orin Hargraves, which was presented in an earlier version at DSNA's biennial conference this year, examines the contributions made by the distinguished philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce to The Century Dictionary and compares his entries with those composed by other Century contributors. "Peirce was probably the best bargain in a contract lexicographer that any dictionary ever signed," Hargraves, himself a contract lexicographer, concludes.

Preceding the opening of the 2019 DSNA biennial meeting, a seminar on topics related to descriptive and prescriptive approaches to usage in dictionaries took place. The wide-ranging papers presented there appear as a forum in this issue and are introduced separately at the top of that section.

In another presentation made at the Bloomington biennial meeting, Paul Schaffner described renewed and ongoing work at the University of Michigan on the Middle English Dictionary, and I invited him to write up his presentation for this issue of the journal. His RWiP contribution much more fully describes the process of revitalizing the MED and mounting it online. He illustrates how its online realization makes the resources of a great dictionary available to newer and older generations of scholars.

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. has written an "In Memoriam" piece honoring John Algeo, who served DSNA as president from 1995 to 1997 and was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1999. Kretzschmar and Algeo worked together at the University of Georgia for many years, and—besides honoring Algeo's scholarly contributions—the obituary alludes to tales of academic intrigue and vegetarian lasagna.

In the Reviews section, four works are examined, including two online dictionaries. In his review of Green's Dictionary of Slang Online, Ammon Shea focuses on the dictionary's online features and directs readers to the "trenchant … analysis" of the print edition by Michael Adams in a review appearing in this journal in 2012. Shea compares the positives of print and online dictionaries and notes that GDoSO "with all its quirks, messiness, and exuberantly ludic linguistic features, should bridge these worlds and be leading the way with a technologically adventurous product which nonetheless retains some of print's humanist pleasures."

A description of progress on the first edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles was reported in this journal in an RWiP contribution in 2012, and in 2017 the long-awaited DCHP-2, edited by Stefan Dollinger and Margery Fee, appeared. Victoria Neufeldt reviews the finished product in this issue. A dictionary editor herself, Neufeldt offered her first DSNA conference paper in 1987, and in it she discussed the use of computers in dictionary-making. Using computers as aids to dictionary-making is, of course, a different enterprise from making an electronic and online dictionary like DCHP-2 and, in the three decades preceding 2017, lexicography and dictionaries have undergone a sea change. More a fan of paper than of computer screens when consulting a dictionary, Neufeldt nevertheless deems DCHP-2 "a tremendous accomplishment, one that … will surely lead to even greater...