We have lots of dictionaries here at Oxford. (Here are just a few.) Yet I had never given much thought to the word “dictionary” itself until I read Elizabeth Knowles new book How to Read a Word. In the following excerpt, Knowles offers a short history of the dictionary, with thoughts from logophiles like Samuel Johnson on the authority of these books of words. –Hanna Oldsman, Publicity Intern
‘Is it in the dictionary?’ is a formulation suggesting that there is a single lexical authority: ‘The Dictionary’. As the British academic Rosamund Moon has commented, ‘The dictionary most cited in such cases is the UAD: the Unidentified Authorizing Dictionary, usually referred to as “the dictionary”, but very occasionally as “my dictionary”.’ The American scholar John Algeo has coined the term lexicographicolatry for a reverence for dictionary authority amounting to idolatry. As he explained:
English speakers have adopted two great icons of culture: the Bible and the dictionary. As the Bible is the sacred Book, so the dictionary has become the secular Book, the source of authority, the model of behavior, and the symbol of unity in language.
–John Algeo ‘Dictionaries as seen by the Educated Public in Great Britain and the USA’ in F.J. Hausmann et al. (eds.) An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography (1989) vol. 1, p. 29
While recognizing the respect for lexical authority illuminated by this passage, it is difficult to find less unquestioning perspectives. The notion of any dictionary representing a type of scriptural authority runs counter, for instance, to the view of the ‘Great Lexicographer’ Samuel Johnson that:
Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
–Samuel Johnson, letter to Francesco Sastres, 21 August 1984
A dictionary may also be highly derivative: twenty years before Johnson’s letter, the French writer and critic Voltaire had warned cynically in his Philosophical Dictionary that ‘All dictionaries are made from dictionaries.’ However, there is evidence that Johnson’s contemporary 0 Comments on Words, words, words as of 1/1/1900