91�첥

91�첥 Fellow studies the history of English dictionaries from 1600 to the present, and in particular their changing representations of socially marginalised people and language varieties. He spoke to us about his research.

I research English dictionaries from 1600 to the present day. I’m particularly interested in their representation of marginalised forms of language and social groups, which I think is important because dictionaries are often perceived as validating the language they include and invalidating the language they exclude. Dictionaries don’t just legitimise words, they also legitimise the world that words represent. If something’s in the dictionary then it’s perceived as real and respectable in some way.

Dictionaries nowadays are claimed by their writers (lexicographers) to be objective records of language. Ostensibly, they achieve this by representing how language is used by the majority of speakers. Lexicographers have massive electronic corpora of text from all kinds of genres – newspapers, magazines, film scripts, blogs and so on, which they draw on for linguistic evidence. They’ll look up a particular word and see hundreds of instances of that word being used and from that they write a definition, saying this is how most people use the word. The problem comes when you’re dealing with minority groups and minority usage, because dictionaries aren’t as good at representing that. Sometimes you’ll get a word that refers to a minority group that is considered to be offensive by many members of that minority, but not by the majority of language users. In cases like that, whose usage does the dictionary side with? Or sometimes marginalised speakers will use words that dictionaries don’t record. Does that mean that those words aren’t as legitimate in some way, or the identities or practices they describe aren’t valid? Lexicographers would say no, but unfortunately that overlooks the symbolic power that dictionaries still hold for many of their users.

One of the things I’m interested in is how dictionaries get pulled into political debates today. Because of the perceived effect dictionaries have of legitimising what they include, people will find a word in a dictionary that’s defined in a way that they don’t like and will write petitions to dictionaries to get that definition changed, or they will find a definition that they do like and they’ll put it up on a billboard or a banner to turn it into a political slogan.

For example, the way that dictionaries define ‘marriage’ has been hugely contentious. People have written into dictionaries demanding the definition is changed to include same-sex couples, or exclude them. In the US a couple of years ago there was a campaign where activists went into bookshops and libraries, found dictionaries containing opposite-sex-specific definition of ‘marriage’, and pasted stickers over them that had inclusive definitions instead. Now there’s a dispute over how to define words like ‘woman’ and ‘man’ which dictionaries have been dragged into, much to the reluctance of the people who write them. Dictionaries have been cited in court cases to determine the meanings of these words – ‘marriage’, ‘woman’, ‘man’, and others – which is frankly alarming for the minorities whose legal rights are at stake.

My research hopefully helps people to realise dictionaries are written by people, not God, and if you disagree with a dictionary definition that doesn’t mean that your understanding of a word is wrong. Language doesn’t exist independently of the people who use it; if a word has a meaning it’s because people have given that meaning to it. As such, no dictionary will ever be a completely comprehensive and objective record of a language – if it’s a living language – because people continue to use words in new and divergent ways. Meanings that happen to be recognized by dictionaries aren’t intrinsically better than those that aren’t.

Stephen’s work takes him into a number of fields, including lexicography, sociolinguistics, the history of English, slang, world Englishes, language and gender, language and sexuality, and the history of literary censorship.

He is working on a project with (University of Oxford) to digitise the correspondence of Sir James A. H. Murray, the chief editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 to 1915 (www.murrayscriptorium.org). He is collaborating on a display at the Weston Library in Oxford, from April to July, on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary and the role the public have played in making that dictionary (poster below).

The Oxford English Dictionary was a hugely collaborative project and Murray sent thousands of letters about words to hundreds of people, so many that the Post Office installed a pillar box outside his house for his convenience. It’s still there and now has a blue plaque. Among the people he wrote to and who wrote to him were many prominent Victorian and Edwardian authors, scholars, scientists and social reformers, including Charlotte Yonge, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Huxley, Flinders Petrie, William Gladstone, Clara Rackham, Elizabeth Wordsworth… the list goes on and on. And those letters had a huge influence on what the OED became. The OED is still used by researchers across disciplines today in order to learn about the history of English, but many researchers are unaware of the OED’s own history as a text, and how it’s been shaped by different research methods and editors over time. Charlotte Brewer and I are working on an open access pilot edition of the letters so people can see behind the scenes of the dictionary and learn something about its origins.

Stephen is also giving a talk at the Anne Lister Birthday Week on Saturday (April 9) called “‘My Use of the Word Love’: Lister, Language, and the Dictionary” – for more details visit the website for and for tickets, .

He has published an open access paper on Anne Lister in The Review of English Studies titled .

The Anne Lister Birthday Week is a celebration of the life of a Regency era lesbian gentlewoman who is famous for being unconventional in many ways – one of which was that she looked up rude words in dictionaries. I’ll be speaking about how Lister used dictionaries as a way of making sense of herself and giving words to desires for which there were no words in polite society in the early 19^th century.

Stephen is also working on a book for Cambridge University Press on how words for queer sexualities have changed over the centuries in dictionaries and outside them.

His Department of English profile page is:

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