Making a Dictionary

[A] The first dictionaries did not describe how words were used; they ruled on how words ought to be used, and the two projects require opposite methods. [B] A dictionary that legislates needs a small committee of people whose judgement is trusted. A dictionary that records needs evidence, and evidence means quotations, in quantity, gathered from every kind of writing rather than from the works a committee admires. [C]

[D] The change from the first to the second is usually told as a change in philosophy, and it was also a change in logistics. Collecting a million quotations is beyond any group of scholars working alone, and the great historical dictionaries were built by recruiting thousands of volunteer readers who copied sentences onto slips and posted them in. That method decided more than it appears to. Words that appear in printed books were captured and words that were only ever spoken were not, so a dictionary that set out to record the language as it is ended up recording the language as it was written, which is not the same thing and has never entirely stopped being a problem.