Words Cast Wide `Net

Insight on the News, Oct 18, 1999 by Jennifer Harper

Lexicographers battle for position as publishers launch a barrage of new dictionaries.

World War III is under way, and it is a wordy war indeed. Competing English-language dictionaries are vying for the prestige and profits afforded those thumb-indexed volumes that win a spot on the shelves and in the hearts of wordsmiths everywhere.

And they are everywhere. English is spoken, as well as read, the world over. Each person has his or her own etymological needs, and there are plenty of dictionaries to meet them.

The cyberspace bookseller Amazon.com lists 75 "best-selling" English dictionaries. This does not include specialty dictionaries offering slang, idioms, cliches, swear words, cooking terms, cyberspeak, street talk and techno-blab, among other things. Rivalry is intense among those contenders big enough to be a doorstop and authoritative enough to silence the most erudite of academics.

There's the new 2,208-page Encarta dictionary (see sidebar), which has the financial backing of Microsoft and claims to be both "a publishing event" and the "image of English at the turn of the millennium," complete with a snappy photo of billionaire CEO Bill Gates right there on p. 738.

A cast of thousands (well, hundreds) put Encarta together. St. Martin's Press hired 250 lexicographers in 10 countries to compile the 400,000 entries, which include such phrases as "dead cat bounce" a succinct bit of Wall Street slang with a verbose definition: "an apparent recovery from a major decline in stock market prices, resulting from speculators rebuying stock that they previously sold rather than from a genuine upturn in the market."

Not to be outdone, the world's most complex dictionary is ready to rumble. The Oxford English Dictionary, already up to 20 volumes, is going to get even bigger. John Simpson, OED's editor in chief, recently invited the public to contribute entries via the Internet to create "a record of the English language like no other."

"There is no longer one English; there are many Englishes," opines Simpson. "Words are flooding into the language from all corners of the world. Only a dictionary the size of the Oxford English Dictionary can adequately capture the true richness of the English language throughout its history."

Burlington, N.J.-based Franklin Electronic Publishers is spurning the weighty for the chatty. Their new, $100 Speaking Dictionary is 6 inches wide and weighs 6 ounces. It's electronic, of course, but includes definitions of 120,000 words, plus a thesaurus, grammar guide, calculator and, in case the user is only in a semi-coherent state, 10 word games. And yes, the dictionary speaks the word aloud and displays the definition (the pocket-sized version is mute). There's also a slot on the side where one can slip domino-sized electronic cards that hold the complete text of several well-known reference books.

Dictionaries are getting instant, too, as in The Instant Intellectual, Houghton Mifflin's "quick and easy guide to sounding smart and cultured." The book is a lexicon of 200 "foreignisms" for those who want to fearlessly revel in such terms as zeitgeist, pas de deux, in loco parentis and that all-time favorite among young Manhattan intellectuals, schadenfreude.

Who will win the dictionary wars? No one, probably. These competitions have gone on without victors for centuries. Even American Noah Webster duked it out with a British rival over the right and proper use of English.

The field, however, will doubtlessly expand. How else will we know, for example, what "Uncle Charlie," "Baltimore chop," "Cactus League" and "frozen rope" have in common?

Easy. Consult The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary: A Cyclopedia Reference to More than 7,000 Words, Names, Phrases and Slang Expressions that Define the Game, new this year.

RELATED ARTICLE: Encarta Does E-mail

Anne Soukhanov, the general editor for the Encarta World English Dictionary, says her multiyear task involving 320 editors and lexicographers would have been impossible without e-mail.

"We were communicating with people around the world, from the Orkney Islands to Seattle," she says. Assignments were delivered via e-mail, "the first time this has been done in the history of lexicography."

The self-proclaimed "first dictionary born in the information age" took a relatively brief three-and-a-half years to assemble, and it features original components such as "cultural notes"--entries on phrases such as "Wag the Dog syndrome: A situation in which a U.S. president uses military attacks on other nations as a diversionary tactic to deflect intense public and media scrutiny from a personal presidential scandal."

"Sometimes a word can come into the language suddenly like a comet and have huge cultural impact," Soukhanov says. "One such word was `sputnik,' which came into our language in the fifties and changed our whole educational program. The other one is `AIDS,' which came in the early eighties."

English increasingly is becoming the world's most spoken and studied language--the first global language since Latin. Due to the Internet, more than 1.5 billion people will be using and speaking English by the end of the year. Encarta breaks those numbers down to 375 million native English speakers, 375 million second-language English speakers, and an additional 750 million learners.