Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 15 • July 2007
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Future of lexicography Barbara
Kipfer
Often people ask about the future of dictionaries. Most
people asking this question seem to think that online or electronic dictionaries
have supplanted print dictionaries. That does not seem to be true after 10+
years of the Internet, as dictionary companies report that sales of print
dictionaries have not declined. Print dictionaries, despite the fact that
they cannot hold spacewise or even featurewise what online and electronic
dictionaries can, are not going away anytime soon. Many who uses a laptop and
the Web in the afternoon use a print dictionary in the evening. However, the dictionaries available online or
electronically will also follow the new phenomenon of what is the wave of the
future, namely, adding new words and definitions more quickly, offering many
more scientific and technical terms, and offering a view on new words and
usages before they are included in print dictionaries. The computer has not
only made it possible to offer dictionaries in electronic and online form,
but has also made the updating and printing of traditional dictionaries
easier and less costly. It is hard to speculate about the Internet of the
future. In the Internet’s short lifetime, dictionaries have gone from being
offered by subscription to being offered for free, then to being offered for
free, by subscription, and with a lot of advertising bordering them. The
Internet model of making money almost strictly through advertising might not
hold up forever and those who offer such products will have to find other
ways to support publishing dictionaries for free. Those who offer subscriptions
also have print dictionaries for sale (e.g. Merriam-Webster and Oxford
University Press) and they will likely continue with that model. But those
who offer dictionaries for free and are supported by advertising
revenue might have to seek other ways to subsidize their business. Libraries are full of books because that is the way we
have conveyed knowledge and expressed literary creativity for centuries. We
have widened our concept of library to include the Internet and
different ways of storing knowledge electronically. Modern technology
encourages new lexicographic creation. A field that was once held to the
restrictions of print now has a wide-open palette. Looking far into the future, one can envision a time
when an international body will be formed to coordinate the lexicography of
the world. Language in general will likely become more and more globalized as
time goes by. By coordinating international lexicography, solutions may be
found to problems which have always seemed to be beyond solution, for
example, a great deal of technical terminology may indeed become global and
serve as a bridge that unites people across all languages and cultures.
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