Lexicography in the Post-Dictionary World

The near-death of the English monolingual dictionary market in this century has implications for the viability of English lexicography as a livelihood. What are Anglophone lexicographers to do now with their specialized skill set if no one wants to pay them for writing definitions? I propose an analogy with the development of photography and its effect on pictorial art. Happily, that development did not result in the end of pictorial art, nor the starving of pictorial artists. But it did change painting forever and irrevocably. Similarly with lexicographers: we have in effect been liberated from the confines of the print dictionary and now our horizons are considerably expanded in regard to what we can do with word and language reference on the internet. There are many innovative language reference tools online and surely many others yet to be developed. Skill in lexicography is also ideally suited for providing expert knowledge of language use in natural language processing (NLP) for the development of training and testing databases, and we need to bring ourselves to the attention of the NLP community with a little more vigor. Finally, I discuss the challenges of maintaining the viability of lexicography in today’s greatly changed dictionary marketplace.