In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us

Jennifer Howard:

For Peter Sokolowski, a high-profile event like the 9/11 attacks or the 2012 vice-presidential debate is not just news. It's a "vocabulary event" that sends readers racing to their dictionaries.

Sokolowski is editor at large for Merriam-Webster, whose red-and-blue-jacketed Collegiate Dictionary still sits on the desk of many a student and editor. In a print-only era, it would have been next to impossible for him to track vocabulary events. Samuel Johnson, the grand old man of the modern dictionary, "could have spent a week or a month writing a given word's definition and could never have known if anyone read it," he says.

Today, Sokolowski can and does monitor what visitors to the Merriam-Webster Web site look up--as they're doing it.

With the spread of digital technologies, dictionaries have become a two-way mirror, a record not just of words' meanings but of what we want to know. Digital dictionaries read us.

The days of displaying a thick Webster's in the parlor may be past, but dictionaries inhabit our daily lives more than we realize. "There are many more times during a day that you are interacting with a dictionary" now than ever before, says Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press. Whenever you send a text or an e-mail, or read an e-book on your Nook, Kindle, or iPad, a dictionary is at your fingertips, whether or not you're aware of it.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 15, 2013 2:21 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas