Abstract: This 37th issue of Dictionaries offers both traditional scholarship and scholarship that blends the traditional with a computational approach to the billions of words accessible to lexicographers on the World Wide Web. Several contributors appear in the journal’s pages for the first time, while among past contributors are two former DSNA presidents, one of whom also edited the journal. Two of the contributions originated as presentations at the Society’s 20th biennial meeting in 2015 in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Two other papers from that conference appeared in the 2015 issue.) Contributors are residents of Canada, Finland, France, Spain, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, and the US. ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Color terms pose a challenge to lexicographers for several reasons. First, color terms rarely refer to a single shade: more often they signify a range. Additionally, speakers often disagree on the name of the color they are seeing. Even in their native language, speakers do not consistently mark the boundaries of a color (Berlin and Kay 1969). As many colors are named after objects, it is unclear how independent the color term is from the object for which it is named. Given such difficulties, the way lexicographers define color terms merits investigation. This paper seeks to determine whether a typology of general lexicographic strategies is the most useful division of defining methods used to define color terms ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Most lexicographers have little background in botany, and most botanists refer to scientific rather than popular dictionaries in their work. This leads lexicographers to make mistakes or at least omissions, and it leads botanists to be less helpful to lexicographers than they could be. For lexicographers, problems in handling flora entries range from understanding botanical terminology to identifying polysemic and synonymic items. Dictionaries often end up with brief, incomplete, and not very helpful entries for readers, not to mention errors in identification and properties. Collaboration between lexicographer and botanist is useful and even essential (Delbridge 1987, 16; Raphael 1979, 41).2 The ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The practice of labeling the geographical dimension of words and meanings has a long pedigree in English dictionaries. For “country words,” for instance, regional marking goes back at least to John Ray’s 1674 Collection of English Words Not Generally Used (Starnes and Noyes 1991, 86). Despite this long history, it is safe to say that the basic underlying practice goes back, like so many other lexicographical traits, to the eighteenth-century literary-lexicographical approaches developed by Nathaniel Bailey and Samuel Johnson. The actual method, that is, the application of labels such as U.S., British, or Southwest has in principle not changed since the early days of lexicography and represents one of the biggest ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In November 1818 The Gentleman’s Magazine paid homage to Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818) with an obituary that described her as a woman “strongly animated with a zeal for science and the study of natural history” (472) and reported that her private collection of books and coins had been presented to the British Museum by order of her brother, Sir Joseph Banks. Though less extensive than her brother’s collection of “books, pictures, rarities from all parts of the world, and innumerable botanical specimens” (Smith 2011, 63), Sarah Sophia Banks’s collection of over 30,000 antiquarian objects included medals, tokens, coins, and printed ephemera that document “the social history of her age” and testify to “her ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Considered by many experts and lay users to be the definitive record of words and their meanings in the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is also one of the most studied by historians and analysts of dictionaries. One productive line of research has explored the decisions made by the editors of the dictionary (James Murray, Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and C. T. Onions) and their staffs. Using techniques of forensic dictionary analysis (Coleman and Ogilvie 2009) and electronic search capabilities not available to previous generations of researchers, scholars have explored decisions, conscious or subconscious, made by the OED’s editors and volunteers, such as which literary sources to plumb ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This issue of the journal is graced with a report about the current and projected state of the extraordinary Oxford Global Languages project. Judy Pearsall, Director of Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, describes the ambitions the press has set to create digital lexical resources for 100 of the world’s languages, with a special focus initially on widely spoken but under-represented languages whose limited digital assets disadvantage their speakers not only culturally but socially and economically. She describes what OGL has accomplished in its completed first phase and what it aims to accomplish as it begins its second phase. Oxford Global Languages (OGL) is a major new initiative from Oxford ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Scholars read boring and mediocre books—disorganized, self-indulgent, clotted, jargon-stuffed, uninspired. It’s a professional responsibility; one must stay on top of one’s subject. Scholars write those books, too. As I type this, I may have yours in mind; as you read it, you may be thinking of mine. Well, it’s all in a day’s work. Rarely does one feel it’s a privilege to read a scholarly work, but when I finished the last sentence of John Considine’s Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800, I felt that privilege—I felt intellectual satisfaction and a humane connection to the subject I had not imagined on opening the book—and knew that I would soon read the whole book again, with yet more pleasure and benefit than in ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Comprising 25 chapters, each punctuated by a puckish 1/2 chapter, You Could Look It Up is what members of the DSNA might call a romp through the annals of reference books. You yourselves, dear readers of Dictionaries, appear in chapter 8 1/2 as self-described geeks. The name is affectionate, however, and one feels the author is touching home base in this passage, just as Samuel Johnson was when in his Dictionary he defined “Grubstreet” as a place “much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems” and then added a shout out to his hood in Homeric Greek. As one of us, Lynch loves dictionaries and all the various kinds of reference books like them that comprise multitudes of ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This book is dedicated to special-language dictionaries as digital resources. The authors treat the concept of “specialized dictionaries” in a particularly restricted way, which is rendered even clearer in the subtitle, which places lexicography in opposition to terminography: the term “specialized dictionary” is used only for what others might term specialized language dictionaries, and excludes all other works that might deal with precise aspects of lexicography. Their usage of the term will be retained throughout this review. It is a volume that is chiefly concerned with the development of a theory of lexicography, called function theory, and the application of that theory to the fulfillment of the needs ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This welcome volume is divided into two broad sections, the first dealing with the linguistic notion of transparency and the second with translation into Spanish, Slovak, Turkish, and Polish. This reviewer was struck by the relatively few books and articles listed in the bibliographies that dealt specifically with medical language as language, although there are plenty on morphology more generally, suggesting an under-researched area as Rachel Bryan points out in the expository introduction to her chapter in this volume (13). The problems posed for translation are a crucial element of this book, although the title does not acknowledge this; a pity, since translation is either mentioned or implied ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: English Historical Semantics is a welcome addition to the Edinburgh University Press series of textbooks on English. Christian Kay (1940–2016) and Kathryn Allan are well known to scholars familiar with the Historical Thesaurus of English project that was developed at the University of Glasgow over many years and published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2009). The book provides an advanced introduction to the study of changes in word meaning in English. The book is divided into ten chapters, each with subsections. The front matter includes a helpful list of abbreviations and conventions. All chapters except Chapter 10, which provides both a ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This book is the latest by Allan Metcalf on the place of words in the English language. The first was America in So Many Words: Words That Have Shaped America. That book sought to progress year by year, identifying each year with a term that arose or in some cases blossomed then. In 1999, Metcalf published The World in So Many Words. From Iceland came geyser; from Norway, berserk; and from what is now the Czech Republic, robot, etc.—demonstrating the sponge-like readiness of English to absorb from where ever whatever it needs. Metcalf has also written about the history of a single word in OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word. His wide-ranging interest in English in America is underscored by ... Read More Keywords: Color; French language; English language; Plants; Creole dialects, English; Lexicography; British Library.; Lexicology; Oxford English dictionary; Reference books PubDate: 2017-01-17T00:00:00-05:00
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