Lexicography: Overview

• Published in: Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics Vol. 7; pp. 113 - 128
• Main Author: Hanks, P.
• Format: Book Chapter Reference
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 2006
• Edition: Second Edition
• Subjects: Anglicisms; bound morphemes; breadth of lexical coverage; Carl Darling Buck; corpus lexicography; descriptive principles; Descriptive research; Deutsches Woerterbuch; dictionaries; dictionary definitions; editorial consistency; Encyclopedias and dictionaries; encyclopedic dictionaries; endangered languages; etymological dictionaries; exemplification; expletives; Funk; grammar in dictionaries; historical principles; idioms; Indo-European; inflective forms; Information science; International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); Jakob Grimm; Julius Pokorny; Leibniz; lemma; lemmatization; lexical item; Lexicography; loanwords; Merriam Webster; multi-word expressions; names; Noah Webster; orthography; Oxford English Dictionary; pedagogical dictionaries; phraseology; practical dictionaries; prescription in dictionaries; principles of lexicography; pronunciation in dictionaries; rare languages; reading program; received pronunciation (RP); Robertus Stephranus; Samuel Johnson; Sir William Jones; slang; special subject dictionaries; synchronic principles; technical terminology; Terms and phrases; token; tokenization; Trésor de la langue française; type; usage nodes; Wagnall; word; word histories; Words; bound morphemes; historical principles; lemma; loanwords; Sir William Jones; type; tokenization; inflective forms; prescription in dictionaries; Wagnall; pedagogical dictionaries; technical terminology; grammar in dictionaries; Carl Darling Buck; Indo-European; reading program; synchronic principles; Deutsches Woerterbuch; descriptive principles; Merriam Webster; International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); pronunciation in dictionaries; etymological dictionaries; endangered languages; idioms; received pronunciation (RP); lemmatization; Samuel Johnson; word; dictionaries; Anglicisms; Leibniz; orthography; lexicography; Funk; Jakob Grimm; Trésor de la langue française; multi-word expressions; phraseology; usage nodes; Robertus Stephranus; breadth of lexical coverage; encyclopedic dictionaries; dictionary definitions; Julius Pokorny; slang; expletives; Noah Webster; token; rare languages; principles of lexicography; names; lexical item; corpus lexicography; practical dictionaries; special subject dictionaries; exemplification; Oxford English Dictionary; editorial consistency; word histories
• ISBN: 0080547842; 9780080547848; 0080448542; 9780080448541; 9780080442990; 0080442994
• DOI: 10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/04873-2

This article is a general survey of ‘lexicography,’ the art of writing dictionaries. Dictionaries not only confirm the spelling, meaning, and use of words; they also facilitate the rapid spread of words and ideas. They played an important part in the spread of Renaissance culture, which would not have been possible without the invention of printing. During the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), there was interaction between lexicography and philosophical ideas about language, and the notion grew that a dictionary should record all the words of a language in a consistent fashion. Lexicography in 19th-century Europe was dominated by historical methods in linguistics and saw the birth of some of the great multivolume national dictionaries on historical principles. In the 20th century, another school of lexicography established itself, the purpose of which was explicitly to describe the conventional uses of words in the contemporary language, relegating etymology and archaic senses of words to a subsidiary role. Since the late 1980s, lexicography has begun to respond to the opportunities offered by computer technology, in particular the use of computers to collect and process evidence of word use on a very large scale.