By Definition: The Surprising History of the English Dictionary

A veteran Merriam-Webster editor celebrates the world’s biggest language through the dictionary In this engaging narrative lexicographer Peter Sokolowski uncovers the history of our language in the dictionary definitions written from Shakespeare’s time to ours. English is always changing. And so our dictionaries present a paradox; they represent stability and standards but they also constantly add new usage and new words (and discard some old ones). The dictionary is, by definition, the story of the way we express culture, authority, and identity with our words. We haven’t always had dictionaries. In Renaissance England, explaining the meanings of words meant translating the Latin of the Church and the French of the Norman bureaucracy. A linguistic class system separated these “hard words” of privilege, prestige, and power from the native English words of hearth and home.