A grown-up dictionary!

It's not often that a project I've worked on gets a mention on Radio 4, but this morning, as I was trying rouse myself out of bed, the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford's single-volume dictionary) got a mention on the Today programme. This was exciting, not just because things I've worked on don't often get talked about on the radio, but also because it was my first foray into native speaker dictionaries and it feels all rather 'grown-up'!

I didn't actually work on researching and writing the dictionary, but I was involved in working on the database on which it's compiled and stored; tidying up some technical stuff, making sure everything was structured and formatted correctly, checking that nothing was missing, checking links and cross-references. It was still a great experience though and an insight into a different branch of lexicography. After years of working on ELT dictionaries, where the vocabulary's all very frequent and familiar, and where the grammar's simplified for learners, at first, it was a bit daunting. I learnt loads, having to deal with grammatical distinctions that I'd never really had to think about before and coming across lots of words that were way outside my vocabulary. I may have only joined the project at the tail end, but it was still fun to deal with some 'grown-up' language for a change!

A is for ...

As we bumped along in the back of the Landcruiser, trying to scan the horizon for giraffes or elephants at the same time as clinging on for dear life, I couldn't help but notice the huge pockmarked mounds of burnt orange soil dotted around the landscape. When we stopped, and I could be heard above the noise, I asked David, our guide, about them and he explained that they were termite mounds and the holes were made by aardvarks.

At the very mention of this singularly eccentric word, my lexicographer eyes lit up. Forget the cheetahs, forget the black rhino, I wanted to see the weird little creature that supposedly starts every dictionary; an aardvark! A little puzzled by my sudden overenthusiasm, David told me the termites' nemesis carries out his acts of murder and vandalism under cover of darkness. Undeterred, I talked him into taking us on a night drive.

Sadly, our usually attentive guide found the gossip of the friend he'd brought along to hold the spot lamp more interesting than our aardvark hunt and after a couple of hours of bouncing around in the dark trying to pick out shapes in the gloom while the spotlight roamed randomly across the landscape, we'd seen nothing more than a few startled antelope.

My lexico-zoological quest will go on though and I'm sure that on some future African adventure, I will come face-to-snout with this alphabetical oddity. At least, I suppose, I saw plenty of zebra ...