To keep the lexicographers from crying and disturbing the people around them, sometimes these small words are pulled from the regular batches and are given to more senior editors for handling. It’s always a noun, and it’s often glossed, because even though it’s now an English word, it’s one of those delectable German compounds we love to slurp into English. “Schadenfreude” may be difficult to spell, but it’s a cinch to define, because all the uses of it are very, very semantically and syntactically clear. Most people assume that long words or rare words are the hardest to define because they are often the hardest to spell, say, and remember. Lexicography, like most professions, offers its devotees some benchmarks by which you can measure your sad little existence, and one is the size of the words you are allowed to handle. While flipping through the galley pages, I realized that my batch-the entire thing-was just one word: “take.” Hmm, I thought, that’s curious. I signed out the next batch in T and grabbed the printouts of the entries I’d be revising for that batch along with the boxes- two boxes!-of citations for the batch.
Unfortunately, my rash brainlessness was obscured from me. In the face of such woozy delight, the chances are good that you will do something rash and brainless. Sadly, lexicographers are not suited to survive extended periods of giddiness. You’d go to the sign-out sheet, see that we’re into T, and make some little ritual obeisance to the moment: a fist pump, a sigh of relief and a heavenward glance, a little “oh yeah” and a tiny dance restricted to your shoulders (you are at work, after all). We had just finished the letter S.īy the time that last batch of defining and its citations-snippets of words used in context-for S had been signed back in on the production spreadsheet, the editors were not just pleased we were giddy. There were about 20 of us lexicographers working on revising the Collegiate Dictionary for its eleventh edition.
It was 2001, three years into my tenure as a writer and editor of dictionaries at Merriam-Webster. Published by arrangement with Pantheon, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. From the book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, available now.
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