Lexicography FAQs: hard words

The other night I dreamt that I had an app on my phone that kept pinging obscure words at me that I had to define at the same time as I was trying to pack up to move house. 

 

Having been deep into a lexicography project for the past few months, I’m loving being paid to play with words all day, but at the same time, it’s clearly messing with my head!

It made me think of one of the questions that people often ask when I say I’m a lexicographer - how I know what the ‘hard’ words mean. My first response is usually that as someone who works primarily on ELT dictionaries, we tend not to get very many ‘hard’ words to deal with. Learner’s dictionaries focus more on high frequency words because they’ll be the ones learners are most likely to come across and need to know. Back in the days of print dictionaries, space constraints largely dictated which words would be included. Crudely speaking, we started with the most frequent words and worked our way down the frequency list until we’d filled the number of pages we had space for. Of course, in a more digital age, those constraints no longer apply and the distinction between learner’s dictionaries and those aimed at L1 English speakers is becoming more blurred.

Frequency notwithstanding though, at the top end of advanced learner’s dictionaries, you do sometimes come across words you’re not familiar with and over the years, I’ve worked on a number of projects that have gone beyond the confines of general ELT, such as working on the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English and on non-ELT projects, including the Oxford Dictionary of English. So, yes, I do have to deal with words that are either right on the edges of my knowledge or that I just don’t have a clue about.

Connections and derivatives

At the easier end of the scale, you’re sometimes faced with words that are related to those already covered in the dictionary you’re working on. A lot of my work on ODE, for example, was adding or upgrading run-ons – words that are tagged onto the end of other entries but don’t get a full entry and definition of their own. So, you might find contentedly and contentedness as run-ons at the end of the entry for contented.

Oxford Dictionary of English (3e)

 

If you’re upgrading a run-on to a full entry, it’s sometimes as simple as adapting the definition from the existing entry to the new part of speech and adding some examples. You still need to do a corpus check though – firstly to source the examples, but also to make sure the word does just mirror its root word in terms of usage. For example, looking at corpus cites for the word deportable recently, it was immediately clear that it broadly means “can be deported”, but a closer look revealed that a person can be deportable – a deportable immigrant/foreign national – but there are also deportable crimes/offences, i.e. ones that someone can be deported for. So, both of these uses needed to be reflected in the entry.

Checking other dictionaries

Another question I often get asked is whether we just copy stuff from other dictionaries. The answer is “No, but …” Dictionaries all have their own style guidelines which dictate how definitions are worded. Learner’s dictionaries have a defining vocabulary; a list of words you’re allowed to use in definitions. There are pages of guidelines about all the other little details such as register labels, regional and spelling variants, and how grammatical information, collocations, etc. are shown. And examples are all drawn from the specific publisher’s corpus, along with guidelines about how many examples to include, how they should be edited, presented, etc.

That said, I do often consult other dictionaries to check my intuitions. I’ll always look at the corpus data first and try to form my own impression of a word, even if in the case of completely unknown words, it’s a bit of a vague one. Then I’ll look at other dictionaries, often 3 or 4 others, to see whether my impressions were in track and then go back to the corpus evidence again. Sometimes, the other dictionaries confirm quite straightforwardly what I was thinking, sometimes they highlight a usage I hadn’t spotted, so I’ll go back to the data to see whether I can find examples. Sometimes different dictionaries disagree, and very occasionally, they just don’t cover the word at all.

Other reference sources:

When it comes to specialized, technical and academic words, I often find that I need to dig a bit further. Sometimes I find myself looking at definitions from other dictionaries but feeling that I still don’t really understand the concept. That’s not to say those entries are lacking, dictionary definitions are about trying to capture the essence of a word as concisely as possible, they’re not about explaining complex concepts in endless detail.  In those cases, I seek out other reference sources, often specialist technical or academic websites that have fuller explanations. It’s one of my favourite bits of the job but can be challenging too. I’ll usually try and look at a mix of sources including some nice simple undergraduate guides if I can find them, as well as the proper technical stuff. Then when I think I’ve got my head around a concept, I’ll try and synthesize it all into an appropriate definition. When it’s an idea within the humanities and social sciences, I often feel like I’ve pinned it down well. In the hard sciences and computing though, it can feel like a half-understood approximation! I was pleased to fall back on my A level in Statistics recently when trying to understand probability density function, but found myself stumped by multi-phase and premeiotic … which is why we have:

Spec checks:

Thankfully, as lexicographers, we aren’t expected to be omni-experts! Anything we’re unsure about, we can flag up for a specialist check so it can be referred to a subject specialist … who’ll probably laugh at our lay attempts to define a techy term before they completely rewrite it!

Thinking about academic lexicons

Last weekend I was in Frankfurt for an EAP Day organized by OUP and ELTAF. The teachers were a mix of those already involved in EAP and those just interested to find out about it, but all were happy to join in and ask questions, even when I plunged them straight into EAP activities first thing on a Saturday morning!

One of the sessions was on EAP vocabulary and as I’ve done before, I started off by asking everyone to write a single word on a blank card that they thought of as typically academic.

In the workshop, I talked about the three categories of vocabulary needed by EAP students developing their own academic lexicon:

- general vocabulary: words in the top 2000 most frequent words in the language, but with a special focus on those apparently common words which have more specific academic uses (table, find, string, etc.)

- core academic vocabulary: as per the Academic Word List

- specialist vocabulary: especially terms used in specific academic disciplines

So how did the teacher’s intuitions about academic vocabulary match up to these different areas?

36% of the words chosen were Top 2000 words. Many clearly fitted into the category of words that are useful in an academic context and have slightly different everyday and academic senses, such as critical, examine and practice. Critical (and criticize and critique) came out as part of the discussion we had about subtly different academic uses. Notice the difference between these two definitions from a general learner’s dictionary (OALD) and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English:

OALD: critical adj: expressing disapproval of sb/sth and saying what you think is bad about them

OLDAE: critical adj: involving making fair, careful judgements about the good and bad qualities of sb/sth

Another 36% of the words chosen by teachers were on the Academic Word List, so solid core academic vocabulary, like significant, criteria, data, assessment and thesis.

The remaining 28% were words which don’t fall into either of the other two categories. Some of these – purport and construe – were clearly very formal and potentially academic in register (both appear in OLDAE), but just not frequent enough to make it onto the AWL. The others form an interesting little group which I may have to consider adding into my workshop next time I give it, and that’s what could be described as words that students won’t actually use in their academic writing, but need to talk about studying. So there were words like dissertation which are about academic study generally (you could add seminar, tutorial, deadline, extension, plagiarism, etc.) and also linguistic metalanguage, such as collocation – the essential terminology you need to talk about language learning (you could add register, hedging, clause, etc.)

To get to this breakdown, I used the Vocabulary Profiler on the Lextutor website, which picks out AWL words and classifies the remainder in terms of frequency. It’s a really useful (free) tool which I gave a demo of in the workshop. I know though that when I've shown it in the past, teachers have come back to me afterwards and said they couldn’t get it to do what I’d shown them. Because the website has so many different tools available, it can be a bit difficult to navigate if you’re not familiar with it. The following link will take you straight to the AWL highlighter tool: http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/ I’ve also put together a short demo:

At the end of the session, I asked everyone to go back to their cards and to classify the word they’d noted down at the start into one of the three groups. 57% of people classified their words correctly, although to be fair, several others chose words which arguably ought to be on the AWL but aren’t!

Thanks to everyone who came for such an enjoyable and stimulating day, I hope you all went away with some food for thought.