we considered all the reasons why morphologists don’t look upon dictionaries as the ultimate arbiters of ‘wordhood’ in English, or indeed in any language. You may not need more convincing of this issue, but for those of you who have a fondness for dictionaries (most morphologists do!), it’s worth knowing something about how dictionaries have developed. I’ll again concentrate on English here, as our common language, but the history of dictionary-making for other languages can be equally fascinating.

Your first instinct would probably be to make a list of words that you would need to define. Assuming that there were no surviving books to use as dictionary-fodder, a good way to begin would be by thinking of categories, and listing everything you could in each one. After you’ve listed all the animals, plants, and types of furniture you could think of, you’d come up with a list of hairstyles (crewcut, bob, beehive, bun, buzz cut, duck’s ass, cornrows, mullet, . . .) and condiments (ketchup, soy sauce, mustard, horseradish, wasabi, sambal oelek, . . .), and so on, and eventually you’d come to articles (a, the, this, that, . . .), prepositions (in, on, above, during, for, . . .) and the other small words that form the grammatical glue that holds sentences together.

But along the way, you’d discover a number of problems. First, you’d have a suspicion that you’d be forgetting things (what, for example, was the name for that women’s hairstyle that was the rage in the seventies?). Second, you and your classmates would get into constant arguments over this word or that: is it worth putting the word mullet in the dictionary as the name of a hairstyle? Wasn’t that slang? Does slang go in the dictionary? What IS slang, anyway? Is it too vulgar to put duck’s ass in the dictionary as a name of a 1950s hairstyle? What about really raunchy words? Is sambal oelek a word for a condiment in English, or is it just something we’ve borrowed from another language (what other language, though?)?

What this thought experiment does is to put you in the shoes of a lexicographer. In reality, it’s been centuries since lexicographers have had to start from scratch in creating a dictionary – and perhaps they’ve never really done so. As the lexicographer Sidney Landau has said about the tradition of dictionary-making in English, “The history of English lexicography usually consists of a recital of successive and often successful acts of piracy.” For years and years, each succeeding dictionarymaker has consulted already existing dictionaries to come up with a base list of words, often adding new ones and sometimes deleting words for various reasons. But at least at first, lexicographers did have to decide one by one on each of the English words to include. Of course, there were manuscripts and books available to suggest words that needed to be included, and in fact, the earliest English lexicographers did rely on the words they found in books as the material from which they built their dictionaries.