“Don’t Trust Your Dictionary”

While people know that you use “the dictionary” to find out what words mean, rather few know how dictionaries make their decisions. Indeed, the very idea of “the dictionary”—as if there is a single one that perfectly reflects the reality of language—exemplifies this problem.

In reality, dictionaries are written by humans, and reflect the biases of their editors and of their times, as well as the general difficulty of describing anything in concise yet accurate detail. Additionally, different dictionaries have different emphases and different purposes.

The Department of English will host Jesse Sheidlower, the past president of the American Dialect Society, a teacher in the Writing Program at Columba University and former editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, for a talk titled “Don’t Trust Your Dictionary.”

His presentation will be held Friday, April 12, from 3:15 to 5 p.m. in Kelvin Smith Library’s Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship.

He will discuss how we got to this point and show that even simple concrete nouns such as “door” or “soup” cannot be accurately defined, and that it is hopeless to look for comprehensive treatment of abstract concepts such as “freedom,” “”love,” “art” and “beauty.”

Despite the widespread belief that dictionaries reveal the absolute truth about the meanings of words, Sheidlower’s lecture will show that the best they can do is be a useful general guide. This is particularly problematic as courts turn to dictionaries to try to understand what, say, “on” meant in the mid-19th century. His lecture also will examine how modern computational techniques can help us answer such questions in more detail.