Quotes About Lexicography

The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

In just the first letter of the OED you will find words as magnificent as agathokakological (composed of good and evil), as delicately shaded as addubitation (the suggestion of doubt), and as odd as antithalian (opposed to fun or festivity). I

It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.

The one thing - apart from assumptions about German - that I have to challenge frequently is people assuming that lexicographers are fierce protectors of the language when in fact our job is not to put a lid on it.

in lexicography, as in other arts, naked science is too delicate for the purposes of life. The value of a work must be estimated by its use; it is not enough that a dictionary delights the critick, unless, at the same time, it instructs the learner; as it is to little purpose that an engine amuses the philosopher by the subtilty of its mechanism, if it requires so much knowledge in its application as to be of no advantage to the common workman.

I contend, most seriously, that there is a real need for a good, thick, complete-as-possible dictionary of 'What People Used to Call Things.'

By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at least it's great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are sons of heaven.

Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.

An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive." - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary

documents—a luxury that earlier lexicographers never enjoyed.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

On his trip to the Hebrides with Boswell in 1773, he used the word 'depeditation' in reference to the actor Samuel Foote, who had suffered a broken leg. Like a Scrabble player, Boswell challenged this, and Johnson admitted he had made the word up, before adding mischievously 'that he had not made above three or four in his Dictionary'. Horace

More enduringly significant than the European influence of the Dictionary was its influence across the Atlantic. The American adoption of the Dictionary was a momentous event not just in its history, but in the history of lexicography. For Americans in the second half of the eighteenth century, Johnson was the seminal authority on language, and the subsequent development of American lexicography was coloured by his fame. America's

While we are in the realm of comedy, it is worth recalling that one of the best and best-known episodes of the historical sitcom Blackadder, titled 'Ink and Incapability', confronts this very subject. Its fidelity to history is limited (Jane Austen is Johnson's contemporary, and apparently has 'a beard like a rhododendron'), but its representation of the perils of lexicography is just. The

To make dictionaries is dull work.

Also of great importance in the discovery of linguistic phenomena that led to cryptanalysis was the development of lexicography.

How come "burbled" gets to be in the Oxford English Dictionary but "tulgy" doesn't? Hm?

Mehr als eine ideologische Strategie ist die Linke eine Lexikographische Taktik.