A word in your ear about dictionaries and their offspring - Sydney Morning Herald - Dictionary

Recently I tried to cull my dictionaries. Why did I still need all these books when I could look up words online? But I didn’t do as ruthless a job as I’d hoped. Looking at my shelves, there are plenty left.

They include The New Oxford Dictionary of English; The Australian Oxford Dictionary; The Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms; The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations; a dictionary of colloquialisms; a selected Johnson’s Dictionary; Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary; and the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. And that’s not counting all the companions and usages books.

Pip Williams’ novel is about words excluded from the Oxford English Dictionary that related to women’s experience.

The trouble is, like most writers, I am in love with dictionaries. I can’t look up a word without setting off on an alluring sidetrack into other words, other definitions. And if there’s anything more fascinating than the dictionaries themselves, it’s the stories of those who put them together.

Samuel Johnson modestly defined the lexicographer as “a harmless drudge”, but he downplayed the drama. The most sensational of these stories is told in Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne, about one of The Oxford English Dictionary’s most prolific volunteer contributors, who turned out to be a millionaire surgeon turned lunatic and imprisoned for murder.

But one disturbing fact about those early dictionary compilers was that they were all men. Australian writer Pip Williams wondered what had happened to women’s words. This led to her novel The Dictionary of Lost Words, in which a young girl whose father is working with a team of lexicographers for the first OED secretly collects misplaced, discarded or neglected words that all have something to do with women’s experience.

Another novel that plays with the history of early dictionary compilers, and has a lot of wicked and witty fun along the way, is Eley Williams’ The Liar’s Dictionary, in which a disaffected toiler on Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary decides to make up words and definitions and sneak them into the pages. The dictionary becomes a form of unreliable narrator.

I’m sure Sue Butler never did such a thing when she was editing the first Macquarie Dictionary, published in 1981, though she might well have been tempted. With Pip Williams, she spoke at a session at the recent Adelaide Writers’ Week about her research. The lexicographers weren’t only focused on Australian literature: they looked at advertisements stuffed in the letterbox, and Butler spent weeks reading Woman’s Day to find words of interest.

Eley Williams has a lot of fun with language in The Liar's Dictionary.Credit: Sophie Davidson

In those days it was thought that Australians spoke British English with a bit of vulgar language thrown in, and everyone wondered if they would bother buying an Australian dictionary. “I looked at it and felt completely numb, I was worried about whether it would mean anything to anyone,” Butler said of the first edition. “But then I took it to a party, and everyone was passing it around and looking up words.”