Lesson Six How Dictionaries Are Made by S. I. Hayakawa

1　It is widely believed that every word has a correct meaning, that we learn these meanings mainly from teachers and grammars, and that dictionaries and grammar books are the highest authority in matters of meaning and usage. Few people ask by what authority the writers of dictionaries and grammars say what they say. I once got into an argument with an English woman over the pronunciation of a word and offered to look it up in the dictionary. The English woman said firmly, “What for? I am English. I was born and brought up in England. The way I speak is English.” Such confidence about one's own language is not uncommon among the English. In the United States, however, anyone who is willing to quarrel with the dictionary is regarded as out of his mind. 
2　Let us see how dictionaries are made and how the editors arrive at definitions(arrive at). What follows applies only to those dictionary offices where firsthand research goes on — not those in which editors simply copy existing dictionaries. The task of writing a dictionary begins with reading huge amounts of the literature of the period or subject that the dictionary is to cover. As the editors read, they copy on cards every unusual use of a common word, a large number of common words in their ordinary uses, and also the sentences in which each of these words appears. 
3　That is to say, the context of each word is collected, along with the word itself. For a really big job of dictionary writing, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, millions of such cards are collected, and the task of editing occupies decades. As the cards are collected, they are arranged in alphabetical order. When the sorting is completed, there will be for each word anywhere from two or three to several hundred sentences, each on its card, which illustrate the meaning and use of the word. 
4　To define a word, then, the dictionary editor places before him all the cards illustrating that word; each of the cards represents an actual use of the word by a writer of some importance. He reads the cards carefully, throws away some, rereads the rest, and divides them up according to what he thinks are the several senses of the word. Finally, he writes his definitions, following the hard-and-fast rule that each definition must be based on what the sentences in front of him show about the meanings of the word. The editor cannot be influenced by what he thinks a given word ought to mean. He must work according to the cards, or not at all. 
5　The writing of a dictionary, therefore, is not a task of setting up ruling statements about the “true meanings” of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one's ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver. If, for example, we had been writing a dictionary in 1890, or even as late as 1919, we could have said that the word “broadcast” means “to scatter” (seed, for example), but we could not have laid down that from 1919 on the most common meaning of the word should become “to send out programs by radio or television.” To regard the dictionary as an "authority," therefore, is to look upon the dictionary writer as being able to see into the future, which neither he nor anyone else can do. In choosing our words when we speak or write, we can be guided by the historical record provided for us by the dictionary, but we should not be bound by it, because new situations, new experiences, new inventions, new feelings are always making us give new uses to old words.