The Future of Dictionaries

In this video, lexicographer Erin McKean discusses the profession of lexicographer and the future of dictionaries in a very humorous way .




In her lecture, she talks about the evolution of language and the shortcomings of traditional dictionaries. McKean looks at the many ways in which today's print dictionary is poised for transformation and how online dictionaries are flat and just “paper thrown up on a screen”, replicating paper dictionaries characteristics.

McKean has been working on an entirely new sort of online dictionary to address some of those shortcomings. Her project is called Wordnik and it is available on the site http://www.wordnik.com/. With more than 4 billion words of text (taken from web pages, books, magazines, newspapers, etc.), it takes the dictionary beyond paper and brings words and definitions that are in "traditional" dictionaries and ones that have not made it there yet. It is based on the principle that people learn words best by seeing them in context.

In the words of Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Wordnik is "a crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic “neighborhoods” of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more." The project is led by Joe Hyrkin, Erin McKean, Roger McNamee, Tony Tam, and Mark Wong-VanHaren.

Wordnik is an indication of how the internet can influence and change dictionaries in the future, with speakers working side by side with lexicographers to make dictionaries almost real-time organisms of the language.

It is a long way from Samuel Johnson’s progress of including words like cat and hat in his dictionary and therefore changing radically the path of lexicography. And It is also a reminder that the history of English dictionaries still has many pages to be written.

(By the way, McKean’s favorite word is erinaceous: "Of the Hedgehog family; like, or characteristic of, a hedgehog.")