This essay explores the role of the dictionary in religious history, specifically as a conduit of social and intellectual authority brought to bear in religious interpretation, sitting both upstream and downstream of the broader flow of history, culture, and forms of knowledge. Of particular interest is the history of three categories of reference works: the bilingual dictionary (or lexicon) focused on ancient biblical languages; the Bible dictionary, focused on biblical realia, geography, and similar topics; and the theological dictionary, focused on significant biblical ideas associated with particular words or the ancient speakers. The categories are situated historically in the development of biblical scholarship and philology in the West, from the pre-modern era through the contemporary and digital context. Two case studies demonstrate the intersection between dictionaries, biblical interpretation, and cultural ideologies: use of Bible dictionaries and lexicons in the antebellum period as a tool for attacking or defending slavery on biblical grounds in the American South; and the influence on theological dictionaries in the early twentieth century from the anti-Semitic context of Nazi Germany.

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Sue Atkins, the Grande Dame of lexicography, who passed away in 2021. In a prologue we argue that she must be seen on a par with other visionaries and their visions, such as Paul Dirac in mathematics or Beethoven in music. We review the last half century through the eyes of Sue Atkins. In the process, insights of other luminaries come into the picture, including those of Patrick Hanks, Michael Rundell, Adam Kilgarriff, John Sinclair, and Charles Fillmore. This material serves as background to start thinking out of the box about the future of dictionaries. About fifty oppositions are presented, in which the past is contrasted with the future, divided into five subsections: the dictionary-making process, supporting tools and concepts, the appearance of the dictionary, facts about the dictionary, and the image of the dictionary. Moving from the future of dictionaries to the future of lexicographers, the argument is made that dictionary makers need to join forces with the Big Data companies, a move that, by its nature, brings us to the US and thus Americans, including Gregory Grefenstette, Erin McKean, Laurence Urdang, and Sidney I. Landau. In an epilogue, the presentation’s methodology is defined as being “a fact-based extrapolation of the future” and includes good advice from Steve Jobs.

Copyeditors and proofreaders are some of the heaviest users of dictionaries, consulting them regularly in the course of their work, though little has been written on the influence of dictionaries on editors or of editors on dictionaries. Editors consult dictionaries on matters of spelling, capitalization, compounding, meaning, end-of-line hyphenation, and more. They may also disallow new forms or senses not found in a dictionary. Further, style manuals typically dictate not only which dictionary to use but how to use it, particularly on matters of spelling variants. Dictionaries thus become prescriptive tools in the hands of editors, despite lexicographers’ descriptive approach. There may also be something of a feedback loop between editors and lexicographers: because editors are gatekeepers of publishing, they have an outsized influence on what appears in print and thus what is recorded in dictionaries and therefore regarded as correct. Through dictionaries, copyeditors may therefore play an underappreciated and largely unexplored role in shaping standard English.

Even though the word has been around for over one thousand years, bitch has proven that an old dog can be taught new tricks. Over the centuries, bitch has become a linguistic chameleon with many different meanings and uses. Bitch has become a shape-shifter too, morphing into modern slang spellings like biatch, biznatch, and betch. Bitch is a versatile word. It can behave like a noun, an adjective, a verb, or an interjection, while it also makes a cameo appearance in lots of idioms. Bitch can be a bitch of a word. Calling someone a bitch once seemed to be a pretty straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations, reinventions, and attempts to reclaim the word – it’s not always clear what bitch really means. Nowadays, the word appears in numerous other languages too, from Arabic and Japanese to Spanish and Zulu. This chapter takes a look at bitch in the present day, and beyond.

This chapter gives a brief overview of sampling based on sparsity. The idea is that a signal which is not bandlimited can sometimes be reconstructed from a sampled version if we have a priori knowledge that the signal is sparse in a certain basis. These results are very different from the results of Shannon and Nyquist, and are sometimes referred to as sub-Nyquist sampling theories. They can be regarded as generalizations of traditional sampling theory, which was based on the bandlimited property. Examples include sampling of finite-duration signals whose DFTs are sparse. Sparse reconstruction methods are closely related to the theory of compressive sensing, which is also briefly introduced. These are major topics that have emerged in the last two decades, so the chapter provides important references for further reading.

This chapter considers how English dictionaries made sense of sexuality beyond modern English society. It begins with the early modern assumption that a nation’s character was commensurate with its language, and that the moderate nature of England’s language and culture entailed that any ‘excess’ found in either must be the result of foreign influence. The chapter examines how sodomy and buggery, along with the semantic field of pederasty, were positioned by etymological, general, and hard-word dictionaries as ethically and ethnically remote, vices practised in the Mediterranean by ancient heathens or modern heretics. These xenophobic associations remained in dictionaries into the nineteenth century. Conversely, lexicographers’ retellings of classical myths of same-sex love—male and female—reveal sites of tension between the moderns’ veneration of Greek and Roman literature and their rejection of its pagan sensuality. The life of Sappho in particular provoked sharp disagreements over what her moral character had been, and what could or should be said about it, in a range of dictionary genres: hard-word, general, classical, and biographical.

This chapter introduces some of the dominant institutional structures through which sexuality in Britain was interpreted. It surveys the relationship between lexicography and the law via buggery and sodomy, perhaps the words most familiarly associated with same-sex intercourse in pre-1900 English. The chapter defamiliarizes them by comparing the diverse explanations given to them across hard-word and general dictionaries, law lexicons, and legal treatises. Lexicographers constructed buggery and sodomy as crimes beyond the bounds of human law, as well as the natural and divine laws on which it was meant to be based; in so doing, they also built for their readers a contrastive model of lawful erotic behaviour. However, the scaffolding of sexual normativity was unstable. Dictionaries ascribed conflicting polysemies to buggery and sodomy, which were variably said to include ‘copulation’ between men, between women, between woman and man ‘unnaturally’, or between man or woman and beast. At the same time, buggery and sodomy were often rendered not only illegal but incoherent, as cross-sex-specific definitions of copulation itself precluded the possibility of same-sex activity.

This chapter examines how lexicographers symbolically policed the borders of English not only by distancing same-sex practices from English society but by disbarring words for those practices from the English language. Though terms for women who had sex with women existed in other Early Modern English text types (and in the bilingual dictionaries that influenced early monolingual lexicographers), they were barely acknowledged in hard-word and general dictionaries. Sexuality between men, though initially well-represented, was also excised by many general lexicographers in the wake of Samuel Johnson, reflecting a growing concern that dictionaries should record only ‘proper’ English. Acts that were inadmissible in polite lexicography would partially re-emerge in dictionaries of criminal cant, which encoded an earthy alternative vocabulary for the men associated with London’s molly houses during the eighteenth century. However, even cant dictionaries would edge carefully around the existence of intimacy between women. And as dictionaries of the underworld gave way to those of fashionable slang in the nineteenth century, unnatural sex of any sort was once again thrust beyond the pale.

This chapter explores the contours of illness and embodiment in medical lexicography. From the early modern period, dictionaries subjected sexual deviance to medical as well as legal and moral regulation, as abominable acts were linked with aberrant anatomies. While hard-word and general dictionaries offered cautionary tales of hypospadians committing bestiality and sodomites afflicted with anal disfigurements, specialist medical lexicons were far more preoccupied with women who had sex with women. Lexicographers endowed these tribades or confricatrices with preternaturally large clitorises which they used to have penetrative sex—though whether clitoral enlargement was the cause of tribadism or its consequence was a question whose answer varied from one author to the next. That dictionaries aimed at physicians were able to dissect women’s sexuality with such candour prompts us to consider the exclusivity of medical lexicography in both social and material terms: with respect to the barring of women from the elite medical professions until the late nineteenth century, and to the escalating price of specialist works compared to the cost of dictionaries aimed at lay users.

The myth that only one kind of writing is correct is the foundation for all the myths that follow. It starts with early spelling standardization and continues with early usage guides. Its consequences include making enemies of formal and informal writing, and making people think correct writing means one thing – and means a capable and good person. Closer to the truth? Terrible writers can be good people, good writers can be terrible people, and all shared writing includes some fundamental similarities, and some differences. Formal writing fancies nouns more than verbs, for instance, and it likes informational subjects. Informal writing has more equal affection for nouns, verbs, pronouns, and adverbs, and it favors interpersonal subjects.

This chapter traces the complex relationship between Anne Lister and the English dictionary. Lister was an enthusiastic user of lexicons of all kinds - general, bilingual, historical and classical. By the time she turned thirty, she had compiled her own private glossary of erotic and anatomical terms as a means of making sense of her sexuality. In recent years, Lister’s life has been chronicled in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, while her diaries have been sporadically quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. Thus far, however, Lister’s use of and by dictionaries has remained underexamined. On the one hand, though lesbian and queer scholars have provided valuable insights into Lister’s reading habits, they have not given sustained attention to her reading of dictionaries. On the other hand, dictionary scholars have until lately neglected the history of women lexicographers, while women’s writing in general has been underrepresented in the quotation banks of dictionaries from Samuel Johnson’s to the OED. This chapter begins by exploring Lister’s imaginative use of dictionaries, then surveys how her idiosyncrasies of speech and writing diverged from the linguistic and social norms endorsed by the standard lexicographers of her day.

Wittgenstein did not address the question of history directly or extensively. But his vision of language is pervasively historical and has implications for the way we do literary history. This chapter examines the idea of use at the heart of Wittgenstein’s vision of language, especially how it differs from the question of context, and how it is related to “forms of life.” After exemplifying these concepts in Wittgenstein by revisiting some of the early remarks in the Philosophical Investigations, I explore the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to show how the teaching of the differences in the use of words is at the heart of its practice. Finally, I highlight the work of an exemplary critic, William Empson, who regarded his work as an important corrective to the OED, and whose work is highly attuned to the history of use. The implications of Wittgenstein’s vision of language with its fundamental revision of linguistic agency show that much contemporary historical criticism is not historical enough.

This chapter examines the different kinds of Indigenous-language texts that scholars can find in the archives, including word lists, philosophical vocabularies, dictionaries, grammars, and religious texts. It provides an overview of the kinds of features scholars are likely to find in these sources and the kinds of (sometimes competing) interpretations scholars have put forward to understand them. This essay argues that Indigenous-language texts reveal the practices of intercultural communication and demonstrate the varied ways traders, missionaries, officials, and other colonizers deployed linguistic knowledge to justify dispossession and to achieve the practical goals with respect to colonization. Yet because these texts ultimately depended on willing Native participation in the production of linguistic knowledge, these sources also provide unmatched possibilities for recovering diverse Indigenous intellectual and sociopolitical frameworks.

This is a chapter about ‘applications’, specifically the application of corpus linguistics to language learning and teaching. The chapter highlights the input of corpus research into reference materials for learners, including a proposal for a novel ‘constructicon’. It then discusses research using learner corpora, with advice on building a learner corpus and exploiting it to gain information on grammatical development and on vocabulary and collocation. Applications of corpus research to the study of discoursal or pragmatic features such as signalling nouns and stance expressions are then discussed. Finally, there is a discussion of the notion of complexity in learner language. The final part of the chapter discusses the issue of language learners using corpora directly. Research in this area is described, as are some of the materials – software and books – specifically designed to enable learners to gain information from a corpus, especially in the area of academic discourse.

The pluricentric status of Spanish is special in that its Academy has the vocation to “purify, fix, and brighten” it, while at the same time acknowledging varietal differences. This chapter first shows that this situation emerged because, after the foundation of the Academy in 1713, the Spanish overseas colonies started to claim their independence, which made it difficult for the Peninsular Academy to impose the norm. The following sections describe how these norms interact, i.e. that certain varieties, particularly Peninsular Spanish, are of higher social prestige than most other varieties. At the same time, a so-called “neutral” (i.e. levelled Latin American) form of Spanish has emerged in international media. The persistence of considerable national differences with no efforts for codification except Mexico and Argentina, however, challenges the establishment of national norms and a supra-national one. The conclusion proposes a three-level model of international Spanish including Peninsular (standard) Spanish, national standards of Spanish, and “español neutro”.

This chapter examines the relationship between English as a pluricentric language with multiple varieties and the instruments of codification that stabilize the variation within their individual lexica. It compares the different types of dictionaries published for settler Englishes (Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, US) with those published for indigenized Englishes (South Africa, India, Singapore, the Philippines), finding that the former have several types of dictionaries (historical and contemporary, with partial or comprehensive coverage of the lexicon), whereas the indigenized varieties have few with limited coverage of the varietal lexicon. Other codificatory instruments, e.g. style manuals, are found with settler varieties but not indigenized ones. The range of such instruments for settler varieties thus correlates with their advanced stage of evolution (beyond endonormativity). The research shows that only those dictionaries which are produced by regionally based lexicographers are indicators of endonormativity. Dictionaries compiled by foreign/international publishers are associated with varieties that have yet to attain their endonormativity.

Chapter 3 describes the fundamental research questions, empirical approaches and findings of language documentation and descriptive linguistics. These are two closely interrelated linguistic subfields concentrating on the collection and/or analysis of primary data for the purposes of documenting and describing languages (corpora and grammars). Methodological issues include considerations on research objects, fieldwork, as well as techniques and procedures of data collection, editing, and analysis such as transcription, annotation, and elicitation. The chapter ends with recommendations for further reading and a list of short exercises and ideas for small research projects.