Bada bing!

Microsoft have just launched a new search engine, Bing™, which they hope will be a serious pretender to Google's web search crown. While the beta is slick with a particularly impressive image search module, functionality won't be the only front on which the battle for search dominance will be won. Microsoft will also have to sell us brand Bing.

According to the Microsoft marketing folk, Bing has an onomatopoeic quality, evocative of that moment of enlightenment or discovery - the 'sound of found'. Steven Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, also expressed his happiness with its potential to 'verb up'. This comment is interesting because, in general, companies are fiercely protective of their treasured trademarks and do their utmost to prevent their verbification or use as a generic noun.

Becoming the generic term for a class of product is certainly confirmation of a brand's dominance. However, if a trademark becomes genericized, the owners’ intellectual property rights to the word are threatened. Syntactic or morphological shifts such as verbification and pluralization can often signal a trademark’s demise and so are actively discouraged by the likes of Google™, Hoover™ and Xerox™ wishing to avoid the fate of escalator, kerosene, trampoline and yo-yo.

The situation gets pretty tricky when it comes to dictionaries. It is the job of a lexicographer to use corpus evidence to identify and record language change accurately. If there is evidence of change in the form, frequency or function of a word - trademark or otherwise - then a good dictionary should reflect this. As can be seen here though, trademark owners will always defend their brand, even at the expense of lexicographical completeness. Consequently, we have to be very careful when dealing with trademarks in our dictionaries - always using the registered trademark symbol where required with the disclaimer that a trademark's inclusion by us has no bearing on its legal status.

Only time will tell if Steve Ballmer gets his wish but he'll surely be pleased to know that the word ‘bing’ has got form when it comes to 'verbing up'. According to The Chambers Dictionary (never one to leave you short of an obscure definition) it is an obsolete slang term evidenced in the works of Walter Scott and means 'to go'.

Incidentally, 'google' as a verb also has an existence independent of search engines. It describes the action of a cricket ball and means 'spin like a googly' - a 'googly' being 'an off break bowled with an apparent leg-break action by a right-arm bowler to a right-handed batsman, or conversely for a left-arm bowler'. Unsurprisingly, neither of these terms is in any way related to the origin of Google™. The name is a play on the word googol and a reference to the ambition rather than the cricketing nous of Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Ruth O'Donovan

A different kettle of ghoti

"The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them."
- Laura Ingalls Wilder

Incorrect spelling annoys people. So does bad grammar and strange punctuation. There are websites, blogs and forums devoted entirely to finding cases of peculiar or humorous cases of these mistakes. But while grammar and punctuation seem (on the whole) to follow logical rules, there are so many shortcomings in our current spelling system that it’s a wonder we still use it to communicate.

The well cited argument for spelling reform, commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, is that with current spelling ‘fish’ could be spelt ‘ghoti’. It wasn’t Shaw who actually made this particular statement, but it’s still a valid point. ‘Ghoti’ takes the sound made by ‘gh’ in rough, the ‘o’ in women, and the ‘ti’ in nation, which phonetically combined could be pronounced as ‘fish’. It’s no wonder that this is possible when you consider that there are nine pronunciations of ‹ough›:

• Borough/thorough ə
• Cough ɒf
• Enough/rough ʌf
• Bough/plough aʊ
• Nought/thought ɔː
• Through uː
• Dough/though əʊ
• Hiccough (hiccup) ʌp
• Lough (Irish loch) ɒχ

Mark Twain satirically devised an ingenious plan to improve spelling by gradually dropping the ‘unnecessary’ letters of the alphabet c, x and y, removing double consonants, ‘fixing’ the use of g/j and w/o and completely adjusting the way we use vowels. Yet what was satirical then was not so ridiculous once. Before the printing press standardized written English, spelling was much more flexible. William Caxton introduced not only the printing press but also Dutch spelling habits, and began to homogenize English spelling. Language was further normalized by Samuel Johnson with his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and since then dictionaries have usually been considered the most authoritative guide to correct spelling.

But here’s the catch: dictionaries are on the whole descriptive, describing the language that people do use, rather than prescriptive, prescribing how people should use language. So rather than set the standard form of a word, most dictionaries merely reflect the one that is most commonly considered acceptable. If the nation decided to start spelling ‘fish’ as ‘ghoti’, you would soon find this updated in The Chambers Dictionary.

Because of this, readers occasionally question why we list the two alternatives of words such as recognize/recognise or organize/organise with the –ize suffix as the headword. The reason is that while both spelling forms are acceptable in British English, only the spelling –ize is regarded as correct in American English, making it more internationally appropriate. In fact, while some British speakers prefer the –ise forms, –ize is actually more etymologically accurate. The suffix was found in many Ancient Greek verbs as –izein, for example baptizein, to immerse, from which our modern baptize is derived. The –ise spelling was a later adoption from the French, and can be seen fixed in forms such as revise and advise.

Of course, as language isn’t a fixed phenomenon, we might just have to revise this all one day anyway. In which case, we’ll keep you posted.

Deborah Smith

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Words fail me

There are few things more satisfying for a dictionary editor than a definition that neatly explains a difficult word in simple terms. That, after all, is the apparent function of a dictionary.

Yet common words can sometimes defy lucid explanation in this way. What if a concept is so fundamental that it cannot be simplified but can only be explained by increasing the level of complexity? On such occasions a dictionary is apt to struggle. For example, The Chambers Dictionary defines the verb laugh as ‘to express, by explosive inarticulate sounds of the voice, amusement, joy, scorn, etc, or a reaction to tickling, etc’. And the definition of north is even more convoluted: ‘the point of the horizon or that pole of the earth or sky which at equinox is opposite the sun at noon in Europe or elsewhere on the same side of the equator, or towards the sun in the other hemisphere’. These definitions may be accurate, but one wonders if any user will come away thinking, ‘Ah, so now I know what that word means.’

You might even argue that everybody knows what words such as laugh and north mean, and so there is really no need to define them in a dictionary. However, there are good reasons for hesitating before deciding that a dictionary should deal only in hard words.

For it is possible and even necessary to give useful information about common terms: the entry for north explains the difference between true north and magnetic north; the entry for monkey explains the technical distinction between monkey and ape, and so on.

Furthermore, especially when viewed in its electronic form, a dictionary can be used as a resource from which to view the entire language. It is possible to use Chambers Reference Online to find all of the dictionary’s New Zealand words, all of the Shakespearean words, all of the words ending in -thon, and much more besides. The results of such searches would be compromised if editors started to discard words that they felt people would never need to look up.

So the definition of north stays in – although suggestions for a simpler and neater version would still be welcome.

Ian Brookes

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Monkey business

The English names of many monkeys are often taken directly from the local names in whatever part of the world the animals are found. When the names are more consciously awarded, however, some themes start to emerge. The names baboon and marmoset both come from French words that mean ‘grotesque figure’. When the people who named monkeys were in a more charitable mood, however, they drew analogies with monks.

The best known example of the latter practice can be found in the capuchin monkey of South America. This creature’s name comes from the supposed resemblance between its thick pelt and the cowl of the Capuchin monks, a branch of the Franciscan order noted for the hooded cloaks worn by its members (capuchon being the French word for a cowl).

A very similar process can be seen in the less familiar word talapoin. This comes from an ancient form of the Mon language of south-east Asia, and originally referred to a Buddhist monk. But it was later applied to a small West African monkey on account of a perceived similarity between the two.

It is curious that the entries for monk and monkey are adjacent in The Chambers Dictionary. On some levels the two represent quite contradictory ideas: monks are solitary, sober and serious, while we think of monkeys as being gregarious and fun-loving creatures. Moreover, although both words start with the same four letters, they have their origins in different languages: monk comes (via Old English and Latin) from the Greek word monachos meaning literally ‘a person who lives alone’; monkey appears to have come from the Middle Low German word moneke.

Is it just a coincidence that two different species of monkey should be named after two different types of holy man? Or is it perhaps that people have looked at these creatures and seen something spiritual going on behind all of their monkeying around?

Ian Brookes

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Words on the chopping block

At the end of February, researchers at The University of Reading claimed to have identified – with a little help from computer technology – the oldest words in English. Among these were the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘who’, and the numerals ‘two’ and ‘three’. More controversially, the researchers proposed words that could disappear relatively quickly, including verbs such as ‘turn’ and ‘wipe’.

As editor of The Chambers Dictionary, I was invited last week to take part in a discussion about the research on The Book Café on BBC Radio Scotland The overriding view among the guests was one of scepticism: surely language evolution is not so predictable that human or machine can say with any certainty which words will have the shortest life?

The extinction of words was a topic I had been pondering just before the research was published, having been prompted by a correspondent’s question about how we assign the label ‘obsolete’ to words in the dictionary. The answer is that we have no hard-and-fast rules, except that the label should be applied to words that we are certain have fallen out of use, usually because they refer to obsolete concepts. But then, it is very difficult to determine when a word is truly obsolete, and our awareness of it means there is always the potential to use it again. If I mention a word that has disappeared from the dictionary since 1901 – let’s say ‘wappet’ (a yelping dog) – can I claim to have resurrected the word by using it in this blog?

It was put to me by a producer on the programme that I must witness the death of words frequently, when we delete them from the dictionary and replace them with others. In truth, Chambers editors are not guilty of deleting very much. The editors of the 1972 edition of The Chambers Dictionary attempted to delete just one word – agene, a flour whitening agent. Not, you might imagine, a word of such inherent character and interest that it was bound to elicit love and loyalty. However, several correspondents remarked on its loss and the word was restored to the dictionary, where it resides contentedly to this day.

A report on the BBC news site on the Reading research described certain words as ‘heading for the lexicographer’s chopping block’. Because they can decide what is included in dictionaries, lexicographers are often perceived as having the final say in whether a word is dead or alive: they are the judge, jury and executioner in a word’s trial. However, lexicographers are well placed to appreciate how difficult it is, when language can be fluid and unpredictable, to say with confidence when a word is no longer in use. They also know how loath word lovers can be to think that any word could ever vanish completely.

Mary O'Neill

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Pleasant surprises

One of the questions you often get asked when people find you are a lexicographer is, ‘So do you know all of the words in the dictionary?’ Unfortunately, this is a question that has to be answered in the negative. Although l must have looked at every page of The Chambers Dictionary on numerous occasions, there are still some words that appear quite unfamiliar to me when I come across them.

Of course, the reason why many words manage to evade notice for long periods is that they are instantly forgettable: scientific and technical terms, perhaps; obscure flowers, pieces of furniture, medieval weapons. But just occasionally I will come across a word that seems to have a very useful function, and I wonder why I have never encountered it before in everyday life.

I have watched golf on television for years and never remember having heard the term hosel, which the dictionary tells me is ‘the socket for the shaft in the head of a golf club’. I must have tied up shoelaces thousands of times, and yet I never imagined there would be a word for those tags on the ends of them before one day I came across the word aglet (‘the metal tag of a lace or string’).

I had a similar experience recently when encountering the word terret. This (among other things) is ‘a ring for fastening a chain to, eg on a dog’s collar’. This seems such a useful word that I am determined to make use of it. Yet it seems that most dog-owners simply use the word ‘ring’, if they feel the need to refer to the thing to which they attach the lead at all.

Wouldn’t life be dull for a dictionary editor if you really did know all of the words and never had the pleasure of coming across something new?

Ian Brookes

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Welcome to the Chambers Editors’ Blog!

Welcome to our very first Chambers blog, where you will be able to read the Chambers editorial team's musings on lexicographic and linguistic topics (and probably a few other things besides). Clishmaclaver struck us as an apt title, as the home of Chambers has always been in Edinburgh, Scotland, and clishmaclaver is what is known around these parts as 'a good Scottish word'.

When I tell people that I am a dictionary editor, it usually elicits an enthusiastic response, and not a little envy. To work so closely with words is clearly on many people's 'dream jobs' list, and so I am reminded that I am in a very privileged position. Some of the words we find ourselves working with in The Chambers Dictionary are, and I say this without overstatement, superb. No matter how familiar you become with the text, you still find some new delight every time you venture in. My own current favourites? Tosticated, meaning 'perplexed', and galimatias, a lovely synonym for 'nonsense'.

Making the dictionary available online has brought a whole new dimension to our work as lexicographers. The gap of years before we could add a collection of new material – or even a single new word – is no longer, and now we only have to hold off for a few months before we bring in the latest crop of good candidates. Like the profession of lexicography as a whole, this is a challenge as well as a pleasure, but we have the satisfaction of knowing that we are keeping our dictionary at the cutting edge of vocabulary coverage.

Mary O'Neill

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