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English
Dictionary Making in America Today This article comprises slightly revised extracts of Wendalyn Nichols’ answers to questions in an interview conducted on-line with Charles M. Levine and herself by Rex How, publisher of Net and Books in Taipei, and published in late 2002 in Chinese translation on www.netandbooks.com and in the mook (magazine-style book) number 5: A History of Dictionaries. The original interview, including Levine’s answers, is online: http://kdictionaries.com/newsletter/kdn11-02-interview.html.
The pioneering work in lexicographic publications for non-native learners of English was done in the UK, and the US has never really caught up. There are many reasons for this; the main one, I think, is the large size of the native speaker US domestic market combined with an unwillingness to cater to the special needs of immigrant populations; the prevailing attitude until the 1960s was the “bootstrap” mentality: “I (or my forebears) pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, and you should too.” The isolationism that prevailed in the US until the Second World War meant that few publishers saw the need to serve international markets, and domestically the US is such a large market for school publishing that the local educational publishers found it more lucrative to concentrate on producing school dictionaries geared toward the specific grade levels in elementary school and high school (called “elhi” for short). In contrast, Britain had a large empire (gradually replaced by the Commonwealth) as a ready-made market of people who needed to learn English (as a foreign language) to get ahead. Once US publishers woke up to the need for special dictionaries for learners of English as a second language, they concentrated mainly on their already-established customers in the US market, specializing in literacy programs and bilingual (Spanish-English) education. These programs did not stress dictionary skills; at the lower levels students relied heavily on their bilingual dictionaries, and at the higher levels students were encouraged to switch to a standard native speaker dictionary. Enough
teachers admired the British EFL dictionaries that the Oxford Advanced
Learner’s Dictionary sold well in the US, and then Longman established
a foothold in the 1970s. The Longman Dictionary of American English
(LDAE) became the best-selling title once it was published in 1981, even
though it wasn’t truly American, being patchily Americanized from the Longman
Active Study Dictionary. American publishers stuck to their elhi dictionaries,
and so the British and US publishers happily split the market. The
reason to keep up with the latest scholarship—like corpus-based
lexicography—is an economic one, and too often reactive: if your books
stop selling, then you figure out why. In the UK, the rivalry between Oxford
and Longman, and the entry into the market of the COBUILD dictionary, meant
that to keep up, everybody had to jump on the corpus bandwagon. US
publishers, who were content to let the UK publishers have this slice of the
market, did nothing about the new trend. Heinle & Heinle was the first
US publisher to attempt an all-American ESL dictionary (the Newbury House
Dictionary of American English), distinct from the Americanized ones
coming from Britain, but it was written by one man rather than a team, and
had no corpus input. Random House made the same mistake with its first foray
into the monolingual ESL market, Random House Webster’s Dictionary of
American English. Now, it has always surprised me that a high percentage
of US teachers prefer the Newbury House dictionary with its made-up example
sentences to the second edition of the Longman one that is corpus-based;
they like the pedagogical nature of the former. They’d gotten used to the
first edition of LDAE, which pre-dates corpora and has example sentences
that use a limited vocabulary. It takes a lot of money to
develop proprietary corpus data, and there was no equivalent initiative in
America to the British National Corpus (BNC), because the US government has
never supported lexicographic scholarship in the way that the UK government
has, and it’s my understanding that the BNC would not have been possible
without a huge chunk of money from Whitehall. At that time—the late 1980s
and early 1990s—the ESL publishing market was undergoing great upheaval,
with mergers, buyouts, acquisitions and divestments happening with such
dizzying speed that even those US publishers who were aware of the “corpus
revolution” could not convince their management to approve a significant,
long-term, capital investment. Houses like Random House that did not have a
history of selling into the ESL market didn’t have the mergers problem to
deal with, but they had the problem of financial models that no longer
allowed for long-term amortization. So, the UK educational
publishers who have the greatest penetration into the US ESL
market—Longman, Oxford, and to a lesser extent Cambridge—already have
dictionaries now, and the US educational publishers remain unable to get
approval for the kind of funding it would take to produce a product line
that would rival the UK titles. McGraw-Hill ought to have seized the
day—they had the cash, the sales penetration, and the size—but they
chose instead to strike deals with other publishers to present their
products to this market. NTC, the National Textbook Company, produces a
large line of dictionaries that are, in my view, second-rate, but which
people buy because they’re cheap. There
is now the American National Corpus Consortium, which got investment from
enough publishers to start work that is modeled after the BNC so that
comparative studies can eventually be done. The first 10 million words are
being released this summer (2003). The initial founder investors have
exclusive access during the developmental period; other commercial houses
that wish to invest may still join, but at a higher fee than was the case
for initial investors. Non-commercial educational institutions and
individual researchers also have access from the start. The texts are being
gathered under the supervision of Randi Reppen at Northern Arizona
University; they are being tagged at Vassar under Nancy Ide; and the
resultant corpus will be housed on the servers at the Linguistic Data
Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, which is also administering
the licenses. At
this point, I see the UK and Japanese publishers as being more likely to
take advantage of the ANC than American publishers, and for the disparity
between British and American products to continue. I wish it weren’t so;
Charles Levine and I had great plans for the application of corpus-based
lexicography to the Random House line, but what can you do when the
visionaries don’t hold the purse strings, and the upper management changes
so often that you don’t have a track record with them you can point to so
that they trust you with large investments? This is the problem in nearly
every US dictionary house; the one healthy one, Merriam-Webster, has so far
remained unconvinced about introducing corpus-based lexicography. American
consumers, meanwhile, will continue to make Merriam-Webster native speaker
dictionaries their number-one choice; ESL teachers and students will
continue to buy Americanized UK products. The
top management of the big publishing groups look at the bottom line:
dictionary publishing does not make the margins they like to see, so they
are perennially putting pressure on the dictionary units to cut costs. Merriam-Webster
is the only major American dictionary publisher that is not under financial
threat or at least dealing with perennial uncertainty: the publishers of the
American Heritage line at Houghton Mifflin are still settling down after
being sold by Vivendi; Random House closed its division in 2001; between
1997 and 2002, Webster’s New World had three different owners. Encarta,
the corpus-based UK-US collaborative project that was supposed to mark a new
breed of dictionary, was done so quickly and edited so poorly that it was a
near-complete failure: you now see copies of it everywhere on bargain book
tables and street vendors’ stalls next to the cut-price brands, because it
had unprecedented numbers of returns of unsold copies from booksellers. The Random House line,
especially the great Unabridged Dictionary, is in danger of the fate of
declining without any revision, unless another publisher decides to buy the
rights to the Random House dictionaries and revive them. The current
managers have even moved all of the citation cards into a storage facility
where they cannot be readily accessed by anyone! Corporate changes are
definitely a threat to the revision schedules and the very existence of the
larger US dictionary publishing units. Outside
the US, American products simply do not have enough sales success to make an
impact. The few exceptions, I think, included the works that Random House
had the foresight (in the old days) to license for translation in Japan,
Korea, and China – the beautiful editions of the Unabridged and College
dictionaries that made Random House a respected name in East Asia.
The American lexicographic tradition for native speaker products is long and
illustrious, but the commercial climate has taken such a toll that the most
brilliant lexicography now happens in specialized areas: Jonathan
Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang; the Dictionary
of American Regional English project under Joan Houston Hall; and the
recently-completed Middle English Dictionary at the University of
Michigan, are examples. Britain, in contrast, still
maintains a commitment to promoting the English language that is lacking in
the US, so the UK-based publishers are less eager to divest themselves of
dictionary units. The only dictionary house in the UK to undergo significant
restructuring in recent years is Collins (the company is now HarperCollins),
and this may have much to do with the fact that it is now owned by Rupert
Murdoch’s NewsCorp. Its schools assets in the US were sold to Pearson
(Longman’s parent company) in the 1990s; the COBUILD project was closed in
the late 1990s because the sales of the product were disappointing. Collins
still owns COBUILD and keeps updating it, but the lexicographic unit that
produced it is no longer in operation. The dictionary program now
concentrates more on native speaker and bilingual titles, and is based in
Glasgow. Having
said that, it is becoming increasingly difficult for any commercially-owned
unit, such as Longman Dictionaries, to get approval for new
innovative capital projects – they seem to be in the “let’s revise
what we’ve got for now” mode. As for the two university presses: Oxford
is also penny-pinching in most areas (it’s more focused on its biggest
capital project, the third edition of the OED); its Americanization of the Wordpower
dictionary is not selling well. Cambridge now has a New York office and
recently produced an American dictionary to compete with the LDAE, but its
sales penetration is also disappointing. The quality of a lexicographer
will still depend heavily on all the traditional skills, as well as talent.
I’ve trained plenty of people who learned the basic concepts but never
became truly good, instinctual lexicographers – and unfortunately there
are too many people out there who’ve had lexicographic training whose work
is really quite patchy. Anybody can be taught the basic principles in a
university course or an in-house training program on lexicography, but it
takes someone with an instinct, an ear for the language—a poet, I would
argue—to find just the right genus and differentiae and commit those to
paper (or electronic database!) within the restrictions of a particular
style guide. A lexicographer will still need
to have something of the teacher in him or her: an ability to convey
complexity in a clear, simple, consistent form. A lexicographer will still
need an unerring knowledge of grammar and a curiosity about usage and new
words that keeps him or her alert to changes in the language – new words,
new uses, shifts in sociolinguistic register. He or she will still need to
be able to interpret citations, which have their own role to play in an
active reading and marking program alongside corpus data. He or she will
still need a keen attention to detail. The
skills required of a lexicographer going forward are also going to include
an ability to analyze corpus data quickly and judiciously,
identifying and differentiating significant patterns from “rogue” uses
of language, and making allowances for any bias the corpus may have. The
lexicographer will have to understand data tagging and be able to work in an
electronic medium, manipulating entries across databases. There are some good CD-ROM
products on the market from reputable companies, and then there are a lot of
bad products with very old data sets being offered for license at
bargain-basement rates. You get what you pay for. Electronic handhelds are
still limited in their usefulness and helpfulness because of the limitation
on memory; I think that wireless handhelds could solve that problem.
That’s where the future is, so whoever is first at successfully
manipulating their data into a compelling, flexible, and useful format for
wireless access, and can strike exclusive deals with the main manufacturers,
is going to make a lot of money. The
perennial problem is that consumers the world over do not know how to tell a
good dictionary from a bad one – it doesn’t matter if it’s print or
electronic. They look at the number of definitions the product claims to
have, and buy the one with the largest number. And the manufacturers of
these devices often choose the cheapest licensing deal they can get rather
than the best content. About the only defense against this is strong
consumer awareness campaigns – if a manufacturer were to choose a
high-quality licensing partner (or develop its own high-quality English
content) and then hit the market with a very strong marketing campaign that
focused on the quality of the product, educating the consumer in the
process, then it might make a dent in this trend. That’s how Longman beat
out Oxford in many markets: they were quicker to exploit corpus resources
and more innovative in their applications, and were able to demonstrate the
difference in a global blitz of teacher-training workshops and conference
presentations. Therefore, schools that teach English ought to be teaching
the students how to choose a dictionary; you’re not going to convince
manufacturers to reform their practices, so you’ve got to teach the
consumer not to buy the inferior products. The Internet also contributes
to the confusion of quantity—or ease of access—with quality. Being
mindful of the quality of the source matters, regardless of whether the
delivery format is print or electronic. I think it was a mistake to offer
online dictionaries for free – the newer works that are still under
copyright and are the most up-to-date should have been set up with a
subscription model from the beginning. Internet users now feel that they
have the right to free information, no matter how much it cost the original
publisher to produce it. Some publishers, like Columbia University Press,
have been successful with encyclopedic works offered online by subscription,
and I think people will start to accept this model, especially now that
companies like Napster have been barred from allowing free music downloads
of copyrighted material. American
Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
4e, 2000. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. ANC:
the American National Corpus, www.americannationalcorpus.org. BNC:
the British National Corpus, www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/bnc. Cambridge
Dictionary of American English, 2000. New York: Cambridge University
Press. Encarta
World English Dictionary, 1999. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Longman
Dictionary of American English, 1983, 1997, 2002. New York: Longman. Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1978, 1987, 1995, 2003. Harlow:
Longman. Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary, 10e, 2002. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster. Middle
English Dictionary, 8e, 2001. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press. Napster:
www.napster.com. Newbury
House Dictionary of American English, 1996, 2000. Boston, MA: Heinle
& Heinle. Random
House Webster’s Dictionary of American English, 1997. New York: Random
House. Random
House Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary, 2001. New York: Random House. Webster’s
New World Dictionary and Thesaurus, 2e, 2002. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley
& Sons.
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