The Word Watchers

What is a dictionary?

Is it, as that notoriously caustic creation Edmund Blackadder would have us believe:

'the most pointless book since How to Learn French was translated into French'?

Or is a dictionary, 'the universe in alphabetical order' (Anatole France) and 'full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories' (R.W. Emerson)?

Well, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a dictionary is:

'A book dealing with the individual words of a language (or certain specified classes of them), so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification, and use, their synonyms, derivation, and history, or at least some of these facts: for convenience of reference, the words are arranged in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical; and in larger dictionaries the information given is illustrated by quotations from literature; a word-book, vocabulary, or lexicon.'

also known (at various times) as:

abcedariaum, alveary (bee-hive) calepin, catholicon, glossary, ortus (garden), polyglot, lexicon, thesaurus, verbal, word-book, world of words.

Dictionaries have attracted both wonder and derision. But what makes them so important? How are they created? Who decides what words should be included?

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