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.

A late-medieval Anglo-Saxon manuscript glossary, illustrated with some drawings to clarify meanings, introduces a tradition of pictorial illustration in printed English dictionaries, a tradition that began on a small scale in the seventeenth century, when it first received theoretical justification. Although the leading lexicographer Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and the authoritative New (later Oxford) English Dictionary in the nineteenth century eschewed pictorial illustration, such images flourished in encyclopaedias and also in dictionaries produced by the Merriam-Webster Co. in the US. During the twentieth century special dictionaries for students of English as a second language, including several published by Oxford University Press, made ready use of pictorial illustration, and the practice of including selected pictorial illustrations continues to be popular in standard dictionaries. Although space in a printed dictionary is severely limited, and no single picture can adequately illustrate the name of a thing, lexicographical inquiry conducted online can now generate a more informative array of images that together can better illustrate the meaning of a word.

This chapter discusses linguistic variation in Slavic languages by presenting an overview of the relationship between human communication in the society and the corresponding linguistic features. In this chapter we focus on the parameters of variation according to the language user, such as age or dialects, and according to the language use, such as communicative functions or communication styles, e.g. politeness. We cite both qualitative and quantitative methods for studying aspects of sociolinguistic variation. Examples are drawn from large corpora of two Slavic languages, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, with a particular focus on academic writing, news reporting, and reporting personal experience in social media, as well as from dictionaries and field studies.

This book explores how the language of sexuality was codified in English dictionaries from 1604 to 1933, surveying the centuries before the coining of identity terms such as queer and heterosexual and then the decades when they had just begun entering wider currency. The introduction explains the temporal and spatial scope of the book and its understanding of sexuality and dictionary. It places the ideological histories of these two concepts in parallel, tracing how both became subject to the scientific spirit of the late nineteenth century—sexuality under the medical lens of sexology, lexicography under the empirical principles of the Oxford English Dictionary. Though prior studies that bring together lexicography and sexuality have been conducted within a range of disciplines, these have often occurred in isolation from each other. In an effort to bridge the divide between dictionary scholarship and queer linguistics in particular, the introduction puts forward an analytical framework which builds on the strengths of both research traditions. This is followed by an outline of how the discussion will be structured across the rest of the book.

This chapter explores the intersections between work by literary scholars with that done in synchronic and diachronic Latin linguistics. As an example of the different approaches and different toolkits employed by the linguist and the literary scholar, I discuss the way linguists have explained the phrase Veneres Cupidinesque in Catullus 3.1, contrasted with interpretations given in commentaries on Catullus and in Latin dictionaries. In the linguists’ account, the phrase is an archaism which continues an earlier Indo-European pattern used to refer to pairs, finding its closest parallels in Sanskrit texts. I then compare literary Latin to other registers and dialects, and discuss the difficulties involved in the term ‘Vulgar Latin’. The chapter also examines other areas in which linguistic scholarship might be usefully consulted by readers of Latin literature: word accent, vowel-length and metre; etymology, semantics and the lexicography; grammars and monographs on morphology, syntax and discourse analysis, including in particular recent approaches using sociolinguistics. Passages from Catullus are discussed throughout.

This chapter explores short American fictions that are like jokes, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s contrast between the “tendentious” joke, which generates “pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions,” and “innocent” humor, its pleasure based on “the liberation of nonsense.” In opposition to ideas of the classical American short story as a compact vehicle of epiphany, it argues for a countertradition of short fiction of “innocent” comedy, which features the linguistic slapstick generated by language learning and exposes the instability of language. It frames the immigrant Leo Rosten as an inheritor of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry, all of whom draw on lexicography and language learning to explore the “innocent” humor of unstable language. Like Boris Eikhenbaum in his description of O. Henry, Rosten’s best-known protagonist, the English-language student Hyman Kaplan, asserts that Russian Jews such as himself are especially attuned to the comic potential of English.

This chapter interrogates critical commonplaces about Johnson’s use of and approaches to language, engaging both with lexicography and the making of Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary (1st ed., 1755), alongside his thinking on language more widely. Johnson’s interest in empiricism and data collection, alongside his deployment of metaphors of slavery and contested power, shed light on his lexicographical method, as does his innovative decision to include letters and letter-writing as a productive source of information, especially of “ordinary” use. His engagement with register and contextual use, with the intricacies of connotation alongside denotation, and with loanwords (and their influence on processes of change and assimilation) document an approach dominated not by rigidity and stasis but by a wide-ranging commitment to a language that, then and now, was marked by its “exuberance of signification.”

In Chapter 6, I argue that the terms ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ have been used interchangeably in the previous literature on the representation of mental illness in the press. Specifically, I argue that using these two terms interchangeably (especially during data collection) may result in incomparable datasets. Through linguistic analysis, I show that the terms ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental health’ are distinct terms, and that the meaning of the two terms has shifted over the time period covered by the MI 1984–2014 Corpus. I argue that the lexical change I observed is consistent with pragmatic accounts of language change in which the language development is in part a result of euphemism (e.g. Traugott & Dasher, 2002).

This chapter provides a discussion of the reported findings. The research questions are revisited and caveats to the research are discussed. I provide suggestions for how research into the language of mental illness may be developed in future studies. I also discuss the practical implications of the research reported in the book.

In this chapter we consider more closely what we mean by a word. We begin by contrasting the differences between the mental lexicon and dictionaries. We then introduce students to the methods and techniques that psycholinguists use for studying the mental lexicon. We look at reaction time experiments, brain imaging, and the ways in which we can study individuals with aphasia and genetic disorders that affect lexical knowledge. Students are introduced to how children acquire morphology. We then look at English past tense morphology in the context of the ‘storage versus rules’ debate, considering what experimentation, brain imaging, and the study of aphasia and genetic disorders tell us about this controversy. The chapter ends with a brief history of dictionaries.

This chapter analyses the role of grammars, dictionaries and other metalinguistic texts in the history and present practice of language standardization, with examples and case studies taken from a broad range of European and non-European languages. The chapter presents a typology of codification types, with examples: standard-creating, modernizing, archaizing and standard-descriptive. It argues that dictionaries, grammars and related texts participate in a historical discourse tradition, with a number of shared features, but where participation in that discourse tradition does not necessarily indicate the presence of a standard language ideology. It presents that discourse tradition in five broad (and inevitably sometimes overlapping) phases: early practical (professional or pedagogical) codifications; patriotic codifications (from the sixteenth century onwards in Europe); public-orientated codifications (rationalist, democratizing codifications, with a wider intended reach, from the late eighteenth century); national and nationalist codifications; and post-national(ist) challenges to standard ideologies. It also looks at the important role of grammars and dictionaries for foreign language learners in the history of language standardizations and the connections to language purism. Finally, the chapter presents a framework to evaluate the difficult question of the authority, reach and ultimate influence of grammars, dictionaries and related texts on usage.

This chapter surveys the history of Scottish dictionaries from their beginnings to the present day, highlighting key historical lexicographers and their contributions to the documentation of the Scots language. Acknowledging the wide-ranging impact that Scottish dictionary-makers have had on the global stage, the discussion focuses on the perceptions of Scots over time and the impact this has had on the types of resources available for its study. Early pioneers including Thomas Ruddiman and John Jamieson are discussed and contextualised. Ruddiman’s influential glossary (1710) supported readers of Gavin Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, while Jamieson, like the Scottish poets of the eighteenth-century Vernacular Revival, sought to preserve and celebrate the language. Twentieth-century and present-day practitioners and their objectives are also considered. The editorial team at Scottish Language Dictionaries, led by Rhona Alcorn, are both educators and curators, building on the legacies of DOST and SND under the banner of the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) and working to maintain the status of Scots as a living language while enhancing its appreciation and acceptance.

This chapter serves as general introduction to clear the ground and explore the transformative nature of language in relation to knowledge creation and how it relates to current and burning issues of (mental) decolonisation in postcolonial Africa. It centres around language as a key factor, particularly in higher education at university level, with due recognition of strategies for the intellectualisation and re-empowerment of formerly dis-empowered languages under the colonial regime, encompassing digital literacy, translations from and into African languages and challenges for lexicography. It outlines the overall structure of the book and provides chapter summaries.

This chapter examines the reception of Augustine’s “Confessions” in the Enlightenment through three major lexicographical works: Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary; Chevalier de Jaucourt’s entry in the Encyclopédie, “Church Fathers”; and Voltaire’s Questions on the Encyclopedia. All of them deliberately misappropriate Augustine's account of his life as a sinner in order to undermine aspects of his theology, and, by extension, the theology of Jansenism in their own era.