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When words leave the dictionary

The Word

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October 02, 2011|By Erin McKean

(ISTOCKPHOTO; GLOBE STAFF…)

Last month saw the publication of the 12th edition of the Oxford Concise Dictionary, a venerable British publication whose first edition was edited by the brothers Henry and Frank Fowler. (Henry is the Fowler behind A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, better known as Fowler’s.) As is common in the marketing of new dictionaries, much was made about the 400 or so new words--including woot, sexting, retweet, and cyberbullying--found for the first time in the latest edition.

Meanwhile, more than 200 words were removed; new editions of print dictionaries almost always manage to squeeze in more words than they take out. These included growlery (“place to growl in, private room, den”) and threequel (a third book in a series). The Collins English Dictionary, in preparation for a new edition out in October, has announced that it will also be removing some words, including cyclogiro, a type of aircraft propelled by rotating blades, and woolfell, the skin of a sheep or similar animal with the fleece still attached.

Removing words is part of the natural lifecycle of dictionaries. If new words go in, some words have to come out, lest dictionaries balloon in page count with each edition or force us to read with a magnifying glass. In my experience, dictionary editors dislike removing words, but do it matter-of-factly: We may not enjoy performing the amputation, but it has to be done to save the patient. (It does lead to a certain amount of second-guessing. I once had to remove a cohort of old-fashioned terms from a children’s dictionary--including words for types of horse-drawn carriages, like landaulet and barouche--and spent the next few months encountering those words with depressing regularity.)

From the reaction to these recent word cuts in the press and blogosphere, however, you’d have thought that the lexicographers were lining up words for execution, rather than exclusion. Critics mourned the omitted words even if--or especially if--they didn’t know them before seeing the news reports. Robert Fulford, in Canada’s National Post, wrote: “It leaves an odd feeling, a cousin to the nebulous melancholy that accompanies the reading of an obituary of someone you would like to have known.”