Getting a word in

A while ago, Michael Quinion, writer and creator of the excellent site World Wide Words, contacted Chambers with a query he had received. His correspondent was curious to find out how you would go about getting a word you had coined into a dictionary.

A surprising number of people have contacted us with a similar query. Neologists can be passionate about the words they create and often view their inclusion in a major dictionary as the ultimate goal.

It is certainly not impossible to coin a word and live to see it entered into a dictionary – every word has started somewhere. However, we often repeat the caveat that we, like other dictionary publishers, don't include words until we have evidence that they have been used by a range of people over a reasonable period of time. No matter how cleverly conceived and logically constructed a word may be, it won't appear in a Chambers dictionary until we are satisfied it is in use.

Lexicographers' decisions on such matters are informed by statistics from corpora – large databases of real language use. At Chambers, we have the Chambers Harrap International Corpus (CHIC), a well-balanced and ever-growing corpus of nearly one billion words. With a little analysis, the citations in such a corpus can show how frequently a word is used and if it is restricted to a small group of users.

It follows that if people do find a coinage useful and start to repeat it, the number and spread of citations will increase and the word could eventually merit a place in the dictionary. So, if you are keen to see a word of your own making entered into a dictionary, you should use it as much as possible, encourage others to do so and, if you have the opportunity, use it in a context with a wider audience, for example a letter to a newspaper or a radio phone-in. Keep a record of when and where you have heard the word because, even with corpus evidence available, there is still room for lexicographers to exercise some personal judgement as to whether a word is likely to become firmly embedded in English. When you have enough evidence to prove that the word has established itself outside your own circle, send all your citations to your dictionary publisher of choice.

If your word makes the cut for the next edition of the dictionary, you can feel content in the knowledge that it has become part of the lexicon!

Mary O'Neill

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Filth

Lexicography is one of the few professions in which it is not merely permissible to use obscene words, but it is actually compulsory. Words that you would not use in conversation with your bank manager or your mother-in-law turn up as part of the work: they are found in the language and there is no avoiding them. Of course, whether this state of affairs is a penance or a privilege really depends on the individual.

Few people of working age are seriously embarrassed or offended by many of the words to which the dictionary attaches its cautionary labels of ‘taboo’ or ‘offensive’. Indeed there is often a certain relish attached to such words, especially when they are used in a way which is neither gratuitous nor offensive. When Michael Caine snorts ‘You’re only supposed in the blow the bloody doors off!’ in The Italian Job, or Audrey Hepburn urges ‘Come on, Dover, move your blooming arse!’ in My Fair Lady, the swearing is integral to the situation and appropriate to the characters, and we are naturally amused.

For most people there is a dividing line between tolerable obscenity and unacceptably foul and abusive language. Yet it can be difficult to judge which words fall on which side of the divide. In a recent conversation I was censured for using the word pee. I had thought I was choosing a harmless euphemism, but something about the word made it quite unpalatable to my interlocutor.

So it appears that each individual may respond differently to a word. Some words may develop unpleasant associations for us from the contexts in which we have heard them. Others may contain sound combinations which are somehow objectionable to our ears. Much also depends on the culture in which the person grew up. Americans, for example, appear to be quite unabashed about using the word crap (although it is not one I would use in front of my local vicar, rabbi, imam or guru), and yet they react with horror when Brits use the word toilet.

On the whole, however, words relating to religion, sex and bodily functions have lost much of their power to shock in recent decades – probably because their subjects are no longer taboo. I can type words such as crap, bloody and arse without experiencing any serious concern that I might be offending anybody. And yet these words have not entirely lost their vestigial power as obscenities - I still wouldn’t use them in front of my bank manager.

Ian Brookes

Those who are not easily shocked will have fun browsing Smut, a collection of the most down-and-dirty of slang words.

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The social life of words

‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps.’

I recently stumbled across this lovely quote from J.R. Firth again and was reminded of how important its message is to the way we carry out language research here at Chambers. When working on a dictionary entry, it is crucial that we support our intuition by gathering evidence of the words with which the term being defined tends to keep company or collocate. This process of uncovering a word’s preferred companions is facilitated by a corpus - a collection of electronically encoded texts of written or spoken language which acts as a representative sample of ‘real-world’ language.

Here at Chambers we have developed the Chambers Harrap International Corpus (CHIC) – almost a billion words of modern, international English from a diversity of sources including newspapers, magazines, blogs, websites, published fiction and non-fiction, and transcribed speech. We use statistical analysis to identify significant collocations in the corpus. Collocations are word pairs with a strong association as opposed to words ending up in each other’s company by chance. Collocations extracted from CHIC for the word ‘powerful’ include ‘powerful politician’, ‘powerful computer’ and ‘powerful antioxidant’. Each collocation corresponds to a subtly different aspect of the word’s meaning which should be accounted for in its dictionary entry.

This sort of analysis is very useful when trying to tease out differences in meaning between two near-synonyms, for example ‘wind’ and ‘breeze’. According to CHIC, adjectives strongly associated with ‘wind’ rather than ‘breeze’ include ‘strong’, ‘fierce’ and ‘damaging’, while those displaying a strong preference for ‘breeze’ include ‘gentle’, ‘balmy’ and ‘cool’. This pattern is replicated in the words’ verbal associations: while a ‘wind’ tends to ‘howl’, ‘gust’ and ‘whip’, a ‘breeze’ will ‘rustle’, ‘caress’ and ‘cool’.

It is important also to observe and record any variation in the company being kept by a word as this will potentially point to new meanings or senses. Take for example the verb ‘burn’. While the primary meaning of ‘to burn something’ is to damage or destroy it with fire or heat, in the last decade or so the verb began associating significantly with digital media terms such as ‘DVD’ and ‘CD’. An examination of these cases alerted us to the ‘making a copy of’ sense of ‘burn’ which was duly recorded in the dictionary. More recently we added a new sense for the noun ‘mash-up’ to Chambers Reference Online (the web edition of The Chambers Dictionary). Originally a ‘mash-up’ referred to an audio file created by merging the vocal track from one song with the instrumental or rhythm track of another, made most famous by the Belgian duo 2ManyDJs. Now, a ‘mash-up’ also describes the combination of pre-existing audio, video, text or graphics to create a new multimedia file. YouTube contains many examples of users merging songs or dubbed dialogue with video clips. This new meaning of ‘mash-up’ is reflected in its more recent CHIC collocates which include ‘video’, ‘YouTube’, ‘ad’ and ‘trailer’ (movie trailers are a particularly rich source of mash-up fodder).

Sometimes the association between certain words is so strong that, rather than pointing to a new sense of one of the words, they point to a multiword term or phrase which has established itself in the language and is deserving of its own dictionary entry. In a recent update to Chambers Reference Online we added two such multiword units: ‘semantic web’ and ‘augmented reality’. Our decision to include these phrases was supported by analysis of the words typically modified by ‘semantic’ and ‘augmented’ in CHIC.

The corpus evidence shows that it’s impossible to underestimate the fickleness of word as social animal but regularly updating our corpus helps us to keep on top of the wealth of information that can be deduced from a word’s social proclivities. All assistance is appreciated however so if any of the words you observe in the wild appear to be behaving suspiciously or moving with a new crowd, we’d be very interested to hear about it.


Ruth O'Donovan

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Sharp-eyed readers and Uncle Sam

To many users, a dictionary is the linguistic representation of a shared culture, one they not only witness but actively participate in. So it is natural that readers often wish to contribute suggestions or amendments to a dictionary that describes the language they use themselves. At Chambers we regularly receive letters and emails that prove to be interesting reading and often include comments that we take into account in future editions of our dictionaries.

Readers often notice the most specific intricacies of language, unearth fascinating facts or citations, and raise initially baffling queries that ultimately result in new discoveries for both parties. There are all sorts of linguistic curiosities that we explore as part of our regular correspondence with readers from all over the world.

One keen-eyed correspondent recently pointed out an interesting citation in James Fenimore Cooper’s tale The Prairie (1827) explicitly linking the name Uncle Sam with the US government. Chapter 10 of the story introduces Captain Middleton of the US Artillery, and describes aspects of his attire and belongings in great detail:

‘At his back he bore a knapsack, marked by the well known initials that have since gained for the government of the United States the good-humoured and quaint appellation of Uncle Sam.’

The correspondent raised a question about the origin of this expression, which is an interesting case of folk etymology versus documented fact.

Common folklore suggests that Uncle Sam initially referred to a real person, Samuel Wilson. A meatpacker from Troy, New York, Wilson stamped barrels of meat bound for American soldiers with the initials U.S., which were jokingly interpreted by the receivers as gifts from ‘Uncle Sam’.

However, historians and lexicographers dispute this derivation in favour of a more established theory. The first traceable written record of Uncle Sam to refer to the US government or its people is in the Troy Post of September 7, 1813, in which the editors declared: ‘Loss upon loss, and no ill luck stirring but what lights upon Uncle Sam's shoulders’. They explained that the term originated with the markings on US military supplies: ‘The letters U.S. on the government waggons, &c., are supposed to have given rise to it.’ This derivation is supported by the quotation supplied by our correspondent. The Cooper citation suggests that, rather than an appellation for a real person, Uncle Sam was indeed a nickname for the government of the United States, resulting from the markings on military equipment – in this case Captain Middleton’s knapsack.

Uncle Sam has continued to be used as a visual representation of America, changing over the years until being established in his current bearded form, complete with the patriotic stars and stripes of his top hat, tail coat and striped trousers. While he may not have ever existed as a real person, he certainly exists as an iconic American symbol, albeit one with exuberant fashion tastes!

Deborah Smith

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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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