Dictionaries in the Public Eye

The first decades of the twenty-first century show dictionaries both enjoying remarkable authority in some arenas and experiencing significant challenges to their authority in others. Dictionaries are more part of the public discourse than they have ever been. They can be pulled up in seconds on a laptop or a phone for a quick word-consultation in a private or public moment, and they hover in the background for "answers" as we read on many electronic platforms. They can make headlines for the regular addition of new words and sometimes for a controversial definition discovered by a user and brought forward for public comment. Dictionaries are also a social media presence, as lexicographers and dictionary publishers now use social media in savvy ways to engage more users—from politically timely tweets to publicity about the word of the year.

The result is that dictionaries—although not in their traditional print form most of the time—are readily at hand as authoritative resources for word meaning day or night. At the same time, users are regularly engaging with the humans behind dictionaries, who are tweeting and blogging and making short videos and the like. And part of that human engagement takes the form of publicly questioning some of the decisions lexicographers have made in their dictionaries, past and present.

The three papers in this forum take on the question of dictionaries' authority at this historical moment from different angles, all raising key questions about lexicographers' responsibilities given how dictionary users approach these resources. Given what we know about common understandings—or misunderstandings—of dictionaries and their authority in the public arena, how should dictionaries adapt to different audiences and common uses of dictionaries—or should they?

Katherine Martin, in "The Decontextualized Dictionary in the Public Eye," usefully begins by providing a typology of online dictionaries, from those closest to their print counterparts to those most decontextualized. The paper highlights the challenges lexicographers face as their content moves out of the context of a traditional dictionary and is adapted for a much wider variety of uses and users. In these online spaces, dictionary-content users sometimes have high expectations for the responsiveness of dictionary makers, be that to new words or to word definitions that are perceived to be problematic or even clearly offensive. Martin, an experienced lexicographer and current Head of Product for Oxford Languages, outlines some emerging best practices to enhance the transparency and responsiveness of the editorial work involved in contemporary lexicography.

In "Dictionary Boycotts and the Power of Popular (Re)Definition," Lindsay Rose Russell picks up this theme of dictionary users' expectations for editorial responsiveness with her concise overview of boycotts of English language dictionaries over the past several decades. While dictionaries continue to enjoy significant authority as a resource for word meaning, when it comes to terms that are socially sensitive given their relationship to social identities or politics, dictionary users sometimes push back. These instances capture the deeply personal and political stakes involved for dictionary users as they evaluate lexicographers' choices in defining words. As Russell points out, dictionary editors in many cases have responded to protests over words and their definitions—sometimes speedily. But these local responses have not yet challenged the normative policies and practices that inform much of lexicography. Who has had access to the authority to define, and whom do they imagine they are defining for? What cultural norms and biases are encoded in dictionaries as a result?

Joseph Kimble, in "Scouring Dictionaries: Their Overuse and Misuse in the Courts," highlights the problems when dictionaries' perceived authority is not challenged enough, specifically in court settings. Working from a larger study of court decisions from the Michigan Supreme Court, Kimble zeroes in on the questionable practice of "cherry picking" dictionary definitions to support a particular decision in a case. These cases draw on the definitions of everyday words, with judges meticulously parsing lexicographers' very human editorial decisions, sometimes to counter a common understanding of how a word is used. Most lexicographers themselves do not support this use of dictionaries in legal decisions, yet as Kimble shows, the practice...