1.1 Introduction

Should you have reason to consult the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) sv typology in sense 3, you’d read the following: “The study of classes with common characteristics; classification, esp. of human products, behaviour, characteristics, etc., according to type; the comparative analysis of structural or other characteristics; a classification or analysis of this kind.” Should you turn to the fourth edition of the American Heritage College Dictionary (AHCD; 2002) sv typology in sense 1, you’d encounter “The study or systematic classification of types,” a minimal definition, to be sure. The definitions differ considerably because they appear in dictionaries of different types. So understanding dictionaries requires attention to dictionary typology. Organizing the mass of dictionaries into types prompts us to identify and evaluate dictionary characteristics. Placing a specific dictionary within the purview of a type tells us something about both the dictionary and the type: we can see better what the dictionary accomplishes in comparison with similar dictionaries; the type expands incrementally when we see better how the dictionary contrasts with others reasonably included in the type. Lexicographers write their dictionaries according to typological norms: if one hopes to compile a bilingual dictionary, one should examine other exemplars of that type to discover what features are essential to the type and where lexicographical imagination can intervene. The value of dictionary typology seems obvious.

Oh, were it only that simple! Reconsider the OED’s definition: it identifies opposite processes as typological. One may assume types and then sort things into them “according to type”; or one may articulate a typology much as one articulates a skeleton, assembling the types in relation to one another bone by bone. When we typologize, do we discover the integrity of already real classes because we find the features that belong to them, or do we construct the types – make them real – by sorting the features in particular ways? Perhaps even a historical dictionary shouldn’t make hard and fast metaphysical or epistemological claims, but at least one might wish to know which of the two a typological claim addresses. It’s harder to see, but the AHCD claims both alternatives, too: one can study a predetermined set of types, or one can classify things systematically into types according to their features. Perhaps consulting a dictionary doesn’t always clarify a word’s meaning, after all.

If you think I’m splitting hairs and definitions to no purpose, I assure you otherwise. Lulu Miller recently proposed more or less the same conundrum, pointing to Charles Darwin’s skepticism about taxonomy (taxonomy “classification” is the senior synonym for typology), which led

Taxonomists of the animal kingdom today are facing the facts about fish, which it turns out may not really be an independent type of animal at all, with some species closer to mammals in their characteristics than to others of what we’ve called fish for a long time (Reference MillerMiller 2020, 170–182). That’s just to say that one can organize an elaborate typology or taxonomy to describe a natural structure, only to discover that it was fiction or fantasy.

Lexicographers in the broadest sense, including “metalexicographers” (the historians, theorists, etc., who may or may not have actual experience of making dictionaries) create typologies or taxonomies of dictionaries, too. Obviously, a dictionary typology is different from that of the animal kingdom, because dictionaries are made by people used to typologies who can make dictionaries that fit the typologies. Those who typologize the natural world have to deal with what they find, not what they make. But that’s perhaps a distinction without a difference – typologies regardless of subject impose order on what, naturally, has no order. Typologies construct knowledge. They are heuristic elements of the discipline, meaningful but not determining, not the end of an inquiry into the nature of dictionaries but ways and means of knowing about them, about the features that lend themselves to the instantiation of genres.

The very notions of taxonomy and typology are modern concepts, though they draw on a long-held intellectual tendency, the cataloguing of the natural order one finds in classical and medieval works, like Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae or Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum (“On the Properties of Things”), though today we would classify such works as encyclopedias rather than dictionaries (that is, as stems in a yet more encompassing typology). Depending on the sense, taxonomy rises as a term of art in English in 1819 or 1835 (according to the OED) and typology in 1888. The vocabulary developed then to describe eighteenth-century biological research into the variety of species, notably in the work of Carl Linnaeus, who invented the scheme of biological nomenclature we still use today. His Systema Naturae, first published in 1735, expanded over the course of the eighteenth century to describe the distribution of animal and plant types. Later in the century, William Jones noted typological relationships among what we now call the Indo-European languages, and language typology became a necessary practice of historical linguistics, so by the twentieth century, philologists and, later, linguists were fully aware of the descriptive power of language typology. It took a while, however, for anyone to apply the model to dictionaries.

1.2 Early Descriptions of Dictionary Types

At the outset of Western lexicography, while there were plenty of dictionaries waiting to be made, it took a while before people started talking about their “types.” In the English tradition, for instance, “hard word” gave way, by the beginning of the eighteenth-century, to what we might think of now as “complete” dictionaries for general purposes. Reference JohnsonSamuel Johnson (1755) and Reference RichardsonSamuel Richardson (1836–37) consolidated that new type, and Reference TrenchRichard Chenevix Trench’s (1857) view of its “deficiencies” led to the OED and historical dictionaries, though John Reference JamiesonJamieson’s (1808) dictionary of Scots and the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854–1971) already occupied that typological space. By the end of the nineteenth century, when James Murray reflected on “The Evolution of English Lexicography” (Reference Murray1900), he mostly provided a historical outline, extolled the undeniable virtues of historical lexicography, and noted that some other types of dictionaries were appearing then, as they had been throughout the century – general purpose dictionaries (Webster), dictionaries of obsolete or archaic words (Trench himself, Reference WrightWright 1852, and Reference Halliwell-PhillipsHalliwell-Phillips 1847), regional glossaries leading to the English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905). It took an accumulation of types before anyone took on the metalexicographical problem of dictionary typology.

Allowing that, no one constructed dictionary typologies per se until the second half of the twentieth century. William A. Craigie, one of the OED’s principal editors, proposed a series of period and regional dictionaries to the Philological Society of London in 1919 (Reference CraigieCraigie 1931), identifying clearly two dictionary types that he nonetheless saw as the same type: he saw all the dictionaries he proposed as historical dictionaries, and the ones produced at his instigation – the Middle English Dictionary, the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, the Dictionary of American English (DAE) – certainly satisfy the requirements of that type. Reference MathewsMitford M. Mathews (1933), while working as an assistant editor on the DAE under Craigie’s supervision, wrote a brief book about dictionaries that outlined more dictionary types without deliberately and coherently engaging typology. He pointed, for instance, to dictionaries compiled on historical principles, but also to lexicographical treatments of Americanisms, his own special interest and lexicographical focus, but the typological failure lies in distinguishing dictionaries by vocabulary treated, rather than by method – except the historical method – or the distribution of both shared and contrasting features. One might approach any vocabulary with several types of dictionaries; each type would represent a different perspective on the given lexicon. Period and language of origin and vocabulary treated are not the bedrock of dictionary typology. The final chapter of Mathews’ book identifies “Some chief features of modern dictionaries” but without sorting dictionaries into genus and species by comparing those features. Reference HulbertJames R. Hulbert (1955), Craigie’s co-editor on the DAE, also published a brief introduction to dictionaries. It distinguishes between “The first English dictionaries,” the “Early complete dictionaries,” and then “Abridged dictionaries.” The OED, he maintained, was “A new kind of dictionary,” that led to “Later dictionaries of the Oxford type,” that is, to historical dictionaries. Hulbert also discusses, in subsequent brief chapters, “English dictionaries of limited scope” and “Dictionaries of slang” which, not being of the Oxford type, constitute distinct contrastive types. Finally, someone had presented a set of dictionary types, yet noting some broad types does not constitute a typology.

1.3 Yakov Malkiel, Dictionary Typologist

Dictionary typology required a partisan of systematic scholarly design. Yakov Malkiel, an internationalist born in Kiev in 1914, came to America to escape the Nazis: “I escaped the Holocaust,” he wrote, “by a hair’s breadth” (Reference Malkiel, Davis and O’Cain1980, 81). Eventually, he settled at the University of California at Berkeley, a professor of Romance languages and literatures and a remarkably prolific scholar (Reference MalkielMalkiel 1988). Malkiel was committed to typology, including dictionary typology. He wrote about the typology of etymological studies (Reference MalkielMalkiel 1957), the typology of Spanish dictionaries (Reference MalkielMalkiel 1959 and Reference Malkiel1960), and the typology of Romance historical grammars (Reference Malkiel1960), and then “reduced” – his word (Reference MalkielMalkiel 1976, 85) – the second of those works into a general theory of dictionary typology, published in Fred W. Householder and Sol Saporta’s Problems in Lexicography (Reference Malkiel and AdamsMalkiel 2022, 133–154; originally 1962), from which ensued his typology of etymological dictionaries (Reference MalkielMalkiel 1976), the culmination of a twenty or more year commitment to typologizing. With Malkiel at the wheel, it would prove impossible for metalexicography to turn away from dictionary typology. In fact, Malkiel’s route led into metalexicography, of which there wasn’t much before the 1960s. That is to say, dictionary typology is more or less the beginning of metalexicography.

1.4 Malkiel’s Dictionary Typology

In his general theory, Malkiel proposes that we can identify the type to which a dictionary belongs by the intersection of three fundamental and necessary criteria: Range, Perspective, and Presentation. He considers these categories distinctive features like those that distinguish phonemes from one another. Distinctive features became a hallmark of structural linguistics (see Reference BloomfieldBloomfield 1933, 74–108; Reference Jakobson, Waugh and Moville-BurstonJakobson 1942; Mathews 2001, 55–69; and Reference KoernerKoerner 2002, 80–82), Malkiel could hardly resist the idea that almost anything could be understood by triangulating three characteristic categories, and thus Malkiel’s was very much an argument of its time. As a model of how to account for variation within a relatively closed system, it also invited imitation.

Malkiel’s approach to dictionaries was always somewhat tentative, a thought experiment more than an ironclad system. That is, he wondered whether differences among dictionary types might be reduced to as few categories of features as possible. Until Malkiel tried, few had organized dictionaries systematically on the basis of anything – not features, not audience expectations, not lexicographers’ intentions, neither the content nor the styles of books called “dictionary” by makers, readers, or librarians. The most notable exception, Lev Shcherba’s “Opyt obshcei teorii leksikographii” (Reference 748Shcherba1940), had been synopsized in English by Reference GarvinPaul L. Garvin (1947) soon after its publication but wasn’t available in full in English until Reference FarinaDonna M. T. Cr. Farina’s (1995) edition/translation. So Malkiel’s work was pioneering, and although almost no one cleaves strictly to his typological scheme today, we nonetheless think about the relations of dictionary features to dictionary genres. Even given its limitations, Malkiel’s typological scheme makes sense intuitively.

According to Malkiel, Range refers to “the volume and spread of the material assembled” (Reference Malkiel and Adams2022, 135) and comprises three subdivisions: density of entries, the number of languages involved, and the balance of “purely lexical data” and encyclopedic information (Reference Malkiel and Adams2022, 135). We can measure density in two directions, one horizontal, the other vertical. A dictionary covers a certain segment of a vocabulary. What we’ve come to call an “unabridged” dictionary will include hundreds of thousands of words, while a college or desk dictionary records somewhat less than a hundred thousand. We might call this measure of a dictionary’s range or scope “horizontal density.” Alternatively, one might consider the extent to which a dictionary explains the words that make up its horizontal density: some dictionaries, considering their audiences, offer fairly brief entries, while others present readers with many senses and subsenses, and historical dictionaries additionally chart the chronological development of those several meanings and illustrate nuances of usage with quotations, for an even greater “vertical density.” Range accounts for the number of languages in bilingual or plurilingual dictionaries; it also accounts for the variable inclusion of encyclopedic information, such as biographical and geographical entries, or notes about usage, word history, and other tantalizing subjects beyond lexical analysis.

Malkiel’s second criterion, Perspective, also helpfully consists of three subcategories that define it more precisely. First is what he calls “the fundamental dimension” (Reference Malkiel and Adams2022, 146), whether the dictionary in question takes a diachronic (historical) or synchronic (current and without historical apparatus) perspective. Second, a dictionary organizes entries according to some principle, perhaps alphabetical, but also perhaps (as in some thesauri) by semantic field. Finally, the dictionary will adopt what Malkiel calls “tone,” which can be “detached, preceptive, or facetious” (Reference Malkiel and Adams2022, 149). The former term applies to dictionaries that take a “scientific” perspective, preferring language facts to usage advice. (It corresponds to the style of dictionaries in the descriptivist tradition.) Preceptive dictionaries, on the other hand, are free with advice, and you can hear their authority in their tones. (It corresponds to the style of dictionaries in the prescriptive tradition.) Facetious dictionaries mean to entertain their readers. Reference BierceAmbrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) exemplifies the tone, but facetious elements arise occasionally in dictionaries of otherwise detached or preceptive tones, as when Reference JohnsonSamuel Johnson (1755) explained under Oats in his dictionary, that while horses eat them in England, people eat them in Scotland.

Dictionaries obviously differ in Malkiel’s third criterion, which he calls Presentation. This criterion admits four “salient points,” as follows: the structure of definitions, the nature of “verbal documentation,” additional “graphic illustration,” and use of “special features (e.g., localization or phonetic transcription)” (Reference Malkiel and Adams2022, 150). Definitions vary widely in “degree of specificity and of fullness,” from single word glosses to extensive sense analyses of polysemous words. Lexicographers fall somewhere on a spectrum of “lumping” and “splitting”: the ultimate splitter reports small gradations of sense in complex, subsectioned definitions; the ultimate lumper avoids the details by identifying a core meaning expressible in a more straightforward and verbally restrained definition. Sometimes, large dictionaries with large staffs end up including both kinds of definition (see Reference StamperStamper 2017, 119–120), which challenges the purity of typological distinctions.

Similarly, general-purpose dictionaries, both college and less-abridged dictionaries, quote literature or journalism occasionally to illustrate usage, often without identifying a source beyond noting the author’s name – even in the digital age, interested users might find it difficult to locate some such quotations in context. Grand historical dictionaries like the OED, on the other hand, often include many precisely sourced quotations per subentry, in chronological order. A. J. Aitken, once chief editor of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, argued that in historical dictionaries, quotations as illustrations of meaning come first, and definitions are abstracts of meanings in the quotations, a sort of semantic scaffolding (Reference 698AitkenAitken 1973, 259). Plenty of dictionaries reside in the large space between the extremes, deploying quotations less densely than the OED and for different purposes, for instance, to sample preceptive usage rather than outline a word’s historical development.

One might think verbal illustration of verbal phenomena sufficient to a dictionary, a word book, but treatment of words for unfamiliar objects, especially, benefit from pictorial illustration, as well, because it “quickens the lay reader’s grasp of scientific definition or an abstract description” (Reference Malkiel and AdamsMalkiel 2022, 165). According to Malkiel, modes of graphic illustration range from line drawings to photographs (an understatement, as Hancher’s chapter in this volume proves). While Malkiel thought “The photograph contributes the dual touch of authenticity and plastic suggestiveness,” he also knew that “The option between drawing and photograph dwindles frequently to a matter of printing costs and available space.” He spoke truthfully at the time that “Pictures pertinent to linguistic inquiries are normally in black and white,” but the fourth edition of the Reference PickettAmerican Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000) ventured into color photographs placed in the outer margin, an example of competition in the marketplace urging a new subtype of dictionary into existence. Color photographs, or any pictorial illustration at all, complicate a dictionary’s range because they are arguably encyclopedic material, certainly when they appear as plates of flora and fauna, national flags, and the like, but also when they intersperse or accompany the dictionary text.

For Malkiel, special features are least interesting and least important – they receive only a paragraph’s attention. Abbreviations and their forms, restrictive labeling (region, class, history, register), phonetic transcription, and the like seem almost incidental to the dictionary’s work. That assessment is itself arguable, but even at the periphery of a dictionary’s design, such features are nonetheless revealing of the dictionary’s purpose and audience. A dictionary with many abbreviations, for instance, is either large or technical or both. The tone of labels and the information they provide figure noticeably in a dictionary’s character, or today we might say brand. A descriptive dictionary like Webster’s Third may prefer minimal labeling; heavy labeling may indicate a preceptive dictionary, like the Encarta World English Dictionary, but also perhaps one focused on regionalisms, like the Dictionary of American Regional English. So-called special features thus coordinate with others of Malkiel’s distinctive features, and at a fine grain distinguish one dictionary’s voice from another’s.

Although aware of the subtle problems attending his approach, Malkiel does not account adequately for his features’ interactions. We accept readily his conclusion that “dictionaries in an entertaining vein tend to be slender” (Reference Malkiel and AdamsMalkiel 2022, 168), because long jokes don’t wear well. Yet slang dictionaries, which began as entertainment of a kind, continue to entertain. Is it really true that “Graphic documentation and a tone either morosely preceptive or irrepressibly jocose are, for all practical purposes, mutually exclusive”? Here, I believe, we see a failure of imagination, which is surprising because Malkiel had plenty in store. The interactions are the gist of his or any other typology, and spending but one concluding paragraph on them indicates at least some limitations to the typological approach to dictionaries, overall.

1.5 After Malkiel

At first, the emerging profession of academic lexicography resisted the notion of dictionary typology, or at least found Malkiel’s scheme wanting. Responding to the general theory in Problems in Lexicography, Reference Worth and AdamsDean Stoddard Worth (2022, 203) doubted the proposed parallel of distinctive features in phonology and those of dictionaries, for “if such a feature analysis does not result in a set of discrete, mutually opposed dictionary types, and if almost all features […] can co-occur freely in all dictionaries, then there seems to be little that is distinctive in the features themselves.” Karl Uitti, one of Malkiel’s closest friends and colleagues, devoted considerable attention to Malkiel’s contribution in his review of Problems in Lexicography, appreciating its nuance and its basis in exhaustive research among dictionaries, but even he wondered, finally,

Clearly, I agree that tightly sewn classifications are bound to fray and unravel, and I think, too, that as they do, they reveal something, not just about the integrity of dictionary distinctive features, but of the typological enterprise overall. Still, at the time, the distinctive feature parallel vexed commentators the most: “Neither was I impressed in Malkiel’s paper by the use of the terminology of distinctive features in order to make a typological classification of dictionaries,” Reference TollenaereF. de Tollenaere (1969, 255) would conclude in his review of Problems in Lexicography, rounding out a decade of response since Malkiel delivered his paper, in 1960, at Indiana University’s foundational Conference on Lexicography (see Reference Adams, Householder and SaportaAdams 2022).

Malkiel did not himself pursue the general theory but narrowed the typological aperture to etymological dictionaries, on which he published a short book (Reference Malkiel1976), demonstrating that typology within a type was easier than typology across types. This revision led not only to greater precision in identifying salient features, but also allowed Malkiel to address issues like “The Total Organization of the Corpus” and “The Structure of the Individual Entry,” because the dictionaries under consideration were more easily contrasted given their similarities. His original categories – Range, Perspective, and Presentation – expanded to Range, Breadth, Scope, and Tone. Reviewers of the book generally found it compelling (see, for instance, Reference BoltzBoltz 1977; Reference LepschyLepschy 1978; Reference MacDonaldMacDonald 1978; and Reference SchmittSchmitt 1978) and the experiment suggested that typologies of closer affinity – children’s dictionaries (see Rennie, this volume), college dictionaries (see Hargraves, this volume), historical dictionaries (see Shea, this volume), thesauri (see Wild, this volume), etc. – might prove more informative than a totalizing typology.

Malkiel’s general theory proved influential, but not as a program or a theory or even an explanatory heuristic. Perhaps surprisingly, Malkiel’s type of typology is practical. Laurence Urdang reviewed Problems in Lexicography and had little good to say about the book. He drew his paycheck as a lexicographer, not as an academic who dabbled in dictionary-making, and he drew the distinction quite unfairly in his review (see Reference Adams, Householder and SaportaAdams 2022, 69–72). But he found Malkiel’s contribution to the volume valuable. Reference Worth and AdamsWorth (2022, 203) wondered whether Malkiel’s typology “might not prove more valuable in the library cataloguing room than in the office of the lexicographer, at least until the analogy with phonology has been worked out more thoroughly.” But Reference UrdangUrdang (1963, 586) felt “it should be emphasized that its value in a library in no way diminishes its value to a lexicographer.” The practicing lexicographer with a typology in mind positions the work, the lexicographer’s intentions, and an audience’s interests in the work within the typological framework, first as a necessary step of planning and preparation, and finally as a benchmark for assessing the success of the lexicographical project in hand.

Nothing testifies to the value of Malkiel’s general theory as a way of organizing and analyzing the dictionary genre more persuasively than Sidney I. Landau’s deployment of it in his textbook, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, first published in 1984, with a second edition in 2001. Landau spent a lifetime in daily lexicography, as a dictionary editor at Funk & Wagnalls, then Doubleday & Company, as the chief editor of Reference LandauJohn Wiley & Sons’ International Dictionary of Medicine and Biology (1986), and finally as director of Cambridge University Press’s reference division in New York. Someone with such a career, writing to those interested in becoming lexicographers for commercial publishers, is unlikely to indulge irrelevant theory in a textbook. Yet Landau begins his chapter “What Is a Dictionary?” with Malkiel’s general theory.

He does so cautiously: “Malkiel’s classification is valuable because it suggests relationships between types. For example, diachronic dictionaries tend to have few or no pictorial illustrations; bilingual dictionaries are seldom diachronic and usually alphabetic in arrangement” (Reference LandauLandau 1984, 7). Such formal regularities, to the extent that they hold, contribute to lexicographers’ expectations for dictionaries they have in mind: “What makes my dictionary more like this dictionary than that dictionary?” proves a useful preliminary question. But Landau finds Malkiel’s approach too “elegant,” and he complicates it, both probing the capacity of Malkiel’s categories and adding some constraints on dictionary-making that qualify the adequacy of those categories. He arrives at eleven considerations: number of languages, manner of financing a dictionary project, age of users, size, scope by subject, aspects of language treated, the nature of the “lexical unit” (from affixes to quotations), the period of time covered, linguistic approach, and the means of access. The last seems especially important with the rise of digital dictionaries, which provide lexicographers with opportunities to build hybrid dictionaries, fantastic beasts like illustrated historical dictionaries and serious dictionaries that nonetheless present material in a facetious style. The general theory admits practical applications, but it is most useful, Landau’s approach suggests, when it participates in a broader, looser set of constraints, some intrinsic to the dictionary, some extrinsic and not part of Malkiel’s model.

Metalexicographers also asserted dictionary typology’s explanatory value, despite the misgivings of Worth and others early on. According to Piet Reference Swanepoel and SterkenburgSwanepoel (2003, 45),

• provides a systematic overview of the various categories and subcategories of dictionaries that are distinguished;

• indicates what the most distinctive feature(s) of each main category and each subcategory is/are;

• makes it possible to explicate the differences and correlations of different dictionaries within a (sub)category.

Swanepoel’s summary suggests two principles. First, whether from Malkiel’s inquiry into etymological dictionaries, or subsequent typological practice, or both, subcategories are at least as important as categories in typological analysis – the narrower the category, the cleaner the typology. His focus on prospective dictionary users is odd, because most dictionary users are as interested in typology as they are in the frontmatter of dictionaries, that is, rarely if at all, and commentary on a dictionary’s place in a typology would surely appear in the usually neglected frontmatter. The user’s need is, I think, a pretext for the more important value represented in the summary, that a typological explanation of dictionaries is, by its very nature, systematic, and metalexicography depends on system – system is its very justification. Many recent works of metalexicography rely on typology to some extent, sometimes very effectively, when the typology in question is really a subtypology – so potentially precise, fully elaborated, and thoroughly inclusive (for instance, Reference ReichmannReichmann 2012) and not only in Western lexicographical traditions (see Reference Yong and PengYong and Peng 2008).

Malkiel’s sense of system was broad and tentative, but Reference ZgustaLadislav Zgusta’s (1971, 197–221) discussion of “The Types of Dictionaries” in his Manual of Lexicography was more concrete, more about the types than the characteristics, one might say: encyclopedic dictionaries vs. linguistic dictionaries, diachronic vs. synchronic dictionaries, historical vs. etymological dictionaries, general dictionaries vs. specialized dictionaries, monolingual dictionaries vs. bilingual dictionaries vs. polylingual dictionaries. These contrasts are all at least implicit in Malkiel’s argument. Indeed, Zgusta refers to Malkiel’s general theory fifteen times in his typology chapter – sometimes in extensive notes – but just six times to Shcherba’s theory, twice linked to Garvin’s translation of part of it. Reference SebeokThomas A. Sebeok (1962) developed an early dictionary typology, too, which acknowledges some of Malkiel’s work pre-Reference Malkiel1960 and which may also have been influenced by his general theory (see Reference Adams, Householder and SaportaAdams 2022, 106).

Historically, then, the typological model to follow changes with the Manual, after which Zgusta takes the foreground and Malkiel recedes into the background. Bo Reference SvensénSvensén (2009, 12–38), in a more nuanced account of dictionary typology than Landau’s, refers to Malkiel’s general theory as “a ‘classic’” (2009, 38), yet he categorizes dictionaries more specifically than Malkiel and without citing his article. Both Malkiel and Zgusta were replaced in recent metalexicography by Franz Josef Hausmann and the grand three-volume encyclopedia of lexicography he edited with Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand, and Zgusta (1989), to which all the editors also contributed, Hausmann on dictionary typology among other subjects. Hausmann entertains several typological schemes, including one close to that in Zgusta’s Manual (Reference HausmannHausmann 1989, 970), but the most interesting, the most systematic, are organized stemmatically, as in a genealogical or family tree. Dictionaries split into general and specialized varieties; general dictionaries split into linguistic and encyclopedic varieties; specialized dictionaries split into those recording lexica according to formal characteristics (Hausmann’s “phenomenological” dictionaries) and those describing the lexica of specific contexts; the phenomenological dictionaries split into those based on speech and those based on text; etc. (Reference HausmannHausmann 1989, 977).

The big encyclopedia includes many sections on subtypes of dictionaries, and many of those begin with typological descriptions of dictionaries in the subtypes. Diagrams of such typologies – the general ones in Hausmann’s chapter, the specific ones in chapters on subtypes – are neat, the categories usually split into two alternatives, the lines from one level to the next rarely crossed, so they seem to make sense of the complex phenomenon dictionary by breaking it down systematically from the most general to the most specific iterations of that phenomenon. If one is temperamentally systematic in one’s thought, the stemmatics are satisfying and seem explanatorily adequate; if one is suspicious of straight-lined clarity, however, one might find the stemmatic approach a little fishy, even if, as Reference Swanepoel and SterkenburgSwanepoel (2003, 44) insists, “constructing dictionary typologies is a crucial component of dictionary research,” by now the conventional wisdom. He also notes (Reference Swanepoel and Sterkenburg2003, 69) that typologies are “tools,” that they necessarily oversimplify, and that “[i]t is impossible to provide a complete picture of existing dictionaries within the limited scope of this chapter” (Reference Swanepoel and Sterkenburg2003, 45), that is, Swanepoel’s chapter, but really any chapter.

1.6 Pruning the Typological Tree

Typologies provide greater clarity, as we’ve already noted, when they focus on subtypes, branches of the typological tree, so to speak, rather than account for the whole tree. The smaller the subtype, the closer it comes to including all dictionaries belonging to the type, and the more accurately it accounts for variation among instances of the subtype. But there are other ways to achieve a more pristine typology, namely, by pruning away whatever makes the typological tree unruly. Metalexicographers are the arborists in this scenario. They can shape the tree by deciding what counts as a dictionary in the first place and whose dictionaries contribute to the density of the tree’s growth, especially in the canopy, far away from root and branch, where structural distinctions are more straightforward, more visible. The canopy can defy vision even of the trained eye. One can also trim the tree by restricting who counts as a lexicographer. If some items we’re tempted to call dictionaries don’t meet the definition of dictionary, then they don’t belong in the dictionary typological tree. If only credentialed lexicographers can produce legitimate dictionaries, then preconditions greatly reduce the number of dictionaries, which thins the tree considerably.

Consider the definition at dictionary in Reference HartmannR. R. K. Hartmann and Gregory James’ Dictionary of Lexicography (2001, 41/a): “A type of reference work which presents the vocabulary of a language in alphabetic order, usually with explanations of meanings.” Clearly, one must know what Hartmann and James mean by the term reference work to understand their dictionary definition: “Any product, such as a published book or computer software, that allows humans to store and retrieve information relatively easily and rapidly” (Reference Hartmann2001, 117/b). Information, in turn, means “Knowledge acquired or required. The dictionary and other reference works attempt to satisfy the need for information, and information technology is used to develop or find ways and means of storing, presenting and interpreting the data of interest to various users” (Reference Hartmann2001, 73/b). These preconditions have their own, albeit unarticulated, preconditions: for instance, we must accept a relationship between information and data, and between information and what one finds in something called a dictionary, but the point is that with all those preconditions, not everything users think of as a dictionary qualifies as a dictionary, as we shall see.

After tearing up several definitions of dictionary, Henning Reference BergenholtzBergenholtz (2012, 30) proposes two of his own, one of which will suffice here, as both more or less follow Hartmann’s lead. A dictionary, according to Bergenholtz, is a

Meanwhile, Bergenholtz’s colleague Reference GouwsRufus H. Gouws (2012, 218) considers who can reasonably be called a lexicographer:

Perhaps lexicographers are like gardeners, but Gouws doesn’t think so. The rest of his article makes the case that there are professional practical lexicographers and metalexicographers – arborists, remember, not gardeners – but no amateur lexicographers. Taken together Bergenholtz and Gouws trim lots of dictionaries from the dictionary typology tree.

But let’s reconsider the tools used to trim the tree. What if someone compiles a dictionary as an aesthetic practice, a mode of perceiving, valuing, and representing the world, more like painting, music, or poetry than a “reference work”? What if one reads a dictionary from a similar interest (see, for example, Reference SheaShea 2008), not to aid in text production or reception, nor even quite to know more about a word, but to enjoy the amateur lexicographer’s aesthetic agency? What if dictionaries were, at least to some readers, a form of entertainment, not reference works compiled to make storing and retrieving information easy? What if dictionaries or more broadly “word books” signified a local identity or a community of practice both in its production and consumption, though differently in either case? Metalexicographers trim the tree along preconditions that exclude dictionaries represented by such questions, and we must ask finally how far such trimming reduces the explanatory value of the resulting typologies.

Asking that last question does not imply that it’s wrong to restrict typologies with preconditions, for nearly all dictionary typologies proposed so far test themselves against too few dictionaries – we are presented with tree diagrams that generally agree on the major branches, but which go into little detail beyond them, as though twigs and leaves aren’t also parts of the tree and their intertangling a challenge for any typology. Typologies with preconditions give us one sort of perspective on dictionary characteristics and the relations among dictionary types, and all attempts to order the wild mass of dictionaries are welcome. But they are also all partial perspectives, unable to account completely or compellingly for all the dictionaries we might arrange on a typological tree. What sorts of dictionaries are preconditional typologies most likely to overlook, and how important is it to include them, even though relations are clearer and more obviously systematic in a trimmer tree?

1.7 Two Canopy Studies: Enregisterment and Facetious Presentation

For our purposes, enregisterment is linguistic jargon for the process by which dialects (or varieties) are socially constructed rather than natural facts. On this theory, developed first by Reference AghaAsif Agha (2003), who draws on work by Michael Silverstein (for example, Reference Agha2003), there’s no dialect until someone proposes that there is one, and after that initiating proposal, the dialect is enregistered indexically: an out-group identifies another group’s language as dialectal; the in-group comments on the out-group commentary; the out-group responds in turn; the in-group commodifies the dialect in order to control it semiotically; etc. Although Agha specifically excluded dictionaries as enregistering agents in the original version of his theory, he appears to have revised that view (Reference AghaAgha 2007), and perhaps he did so when he realized that the dictionary typology of his assumptions was an inadequate account of dictionaries and their relationships to dialects.

In fact, many dictionaries participate in enregisterment (see Finegan, this volume) – though we’ll have to return to the question of what counts as a dictionary in the wake of that claim – some of them legitimate enough to satisfy metalexicographers and many of them not. When a dictionary enregisters, it projects an ideological position about the importance of the language and subculture of a place, so the purposes of such dictionaries far exceed their uses in text production and reception. Thus, we have historical dictionaries of Alaskan English (Reference TabbertTabbert 1991), Antarctic English (Reference HinceHince 2000), Newfoundland English (Reference Story, Kirwin and WiddowsonStory, Kirwin, and Widdowson 1982), Prince Edward Island English (Reference PrattPratt 1988), and Liverpool English (Reference CrowleyCrowley 2017), all of which are also enregistering dictionaries. Whether larger, multi-dialectal dictionaries like the English Dialect Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English can enregister is still an open question (see Reference AdamsAdams forthcoming), but scope, or Malkiel’s “range” figure in the question – enregistering dictionaries should be of narrower scope than general-purpose or even college dictionaries. Enregistering dictionaries need not be historical dictionaries, however, and so stemmata in the dictionary tree cross one another in a typological tangle.

Many enregistering dictionaries are little and ephemeral, and some would insist that they are glossaries rather than dictionaries, because they don’t satisfy the definitions proposed by Hartmann and James and Bergenholtz. They are limited in scope, wordlists with brief definitions but none of what we’ve come to take for granted as dictionary apparatus. The Lilly Library at Indiana University, however, has recently taken in collections that include many such books or booklets written by local people to project the value of local speech out to a wider audience, as an indexical move in the enregisterment game. Their power to enregister is transparent but is also reflected in research on the enregisterment of specific dialects, as effective enregistering agents. For instance, in describing the language of Liverpool and its environs, Tony Crowley relies somewhat on Learn Yerself Scouse (Reference Shaw, Spiegl and KellyShaw, Spiegl, and Kelly 1966) in both Scouse: A Social and Cultural History (Reference Crowley2012) and Reference Valdman, Moody and DaviesThe Liverpool English Dictionary (2017) – that is, little dictionaries participate in enregisterment and also serve as sources for “legitimate” lexicography. Similarly, Reference McCoolSam McCool’s New Pittsburghese: How to Speak Like a Pittsburgher (1982) runs throughout research on Pittsburghese, especially that of Barbara Reference JohnstoneJohnstone (2013, 17–18, 33–35, and 157–161) and her colleagues (for example, Reference Johnstone, Baumgardt, Eberhardt and KieslingJohnstone, Eberhardt, Kiesling, and Baumgartner 2015). So little, usually overlooked works participate indelibly in lexicographical research and dictionary production, even though they receive no typological attention.

One can explain though perhaps not justify the lack of attention. After all, the little, ephemeral books in the Lilly Library or any other library might more accurately be called booklets, and they might qualify as glossaries more readily than as dictionaries. But such distinctions are largely artificial. The earliest English dictionaries, according to the standard histories, works in the “hard words” dictionary tradition, like Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (1604), are structurally no more complicated than a book(let) like Jest Tawk: A Country Dictionary (Reference BlairBlair 1986). Both are short, neither includes etymologies or illustrative quotations, and they tend to gloss terms rather than define them, sticking with one word and one meaning at a time – treatment of polysemy leads from the format and style (right down to typography) of a glossary to books a bookseller would place confidently in the dictionary section of the store. But even should we distinguish glossaries from dictionaries, they might nonetheless occupy a branch of the dictionary typology tree.

Jest Tawk was compiled by Les Blair who, with Geanie Blair, was proprietor of Ozark-Maid Candy Kitchen, a roadside store in Missouri. It runs to fifty-two pages between brightly colored covers and is “spiced with country sayins.” Partly promotional, it may have been slipped into bags with the Blairs’ compliments or sold at the register for $2.00, which is what the copyright page says a copy cost by mail. Most of the entries record local pronunciations of common words, which makes it like many another corner store or roadside dialect dictionary. One purpose of Jest Tawk is to project local identity, along the lines of enregisterment, and another is to use local identity to support brand identity and sell candy. If you saw Jest Tawk on a friend’s coffee table, you’d be sure to stop by Ozark-Maid Candy Kitchen the next time you passed through Osage Beach, Missouri. While Cawdrey’s little “dictionary” was compiled to aid in text production or reception and thus meets the expectations of metalexicographers, neither enregisterment nor branding motivates branching – or twigging – of dictionary typology as the literature of the field records it today, and thus we see how little a big branching typology accomplishes for us. If we conducted a census of college dictionaries, on one hand, and another of little, ephemeral, corner store or roadside dictionaries on the other, certainly we’d discover that there are more, many more, of the latter than of the former; and the little dictionaries have profound and multivalent cultural value, even if they don’t carry the imprimatur of major dictionary publishers. Shall we cancel them typologically on the basis of preconditions, or does any valid typology necessarily include them?

These little dictionaries present lexical data and evince language ideologies, the latter much more obviously and instructively than more official dictionaries, and in doing so promote enregisterment of the local language they represent. But they also entertain and are meant to do so (consider the title, Jest Tawk). Partly, that’s due to the framing of the language included as “exotic” to the naïve passerby, but also in the treatment of the lexis and in what many professional lexicographers consider ancillary features, illustrations, for instance, from full-color covers to line drawings among the entries (for more examples, with color illustrations, see Reference AdamsAdams 2021). Stemmata invite us to put the official “serious” dictionaries over here and amateur “humorous” dictionaries over there – few consider such dictionaries as of the same type, yet in any instance like Jest Tawk, both types inhabit the same artifact.

Illustrations serve contemporary dictionaries well: some include line drawings, some photographs. Reference Malkiel and AdamsMalkiel (2022, 151) proposes that “The drawing or sketch in a dictionary adds that dosage of concreteness which quickens the lay reader’s grasp of scientific definition or an abstract description. The photograph contributes the dual touch of authenticity and plastic suggestiveness.” Such pictures, however, support the official general-purpose dictionary’s serious purposes – they inform rather than entertain. Reference Malkiel and AdamsMalkiel (2022, 149–150) also addresses the tone of Jest Tawk and similar dictionaries presciently:

Dean Stoddard Worth, responding to Malkiel’s argument (Reference Worth and AdamsWorth 2022, 203), suggested that “jocularity […] can perhaps be omitted [from the repertoire of dictionary features] as irrelevant to a serious discussion.” Worth was, from the beginning of dictionary typology, a preconditional metalexicographer, but trimming away so many jocular dictionaries simply misrepresents the class of works we call, however loosely, dictionaries.

Between the G. & C. Merriam Company’s acquisition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (Reference Webster1828) and the present, commercial lexicography has been serious business, and, of course, academic lexicography – academic anything, really – is at least as serious. Sometimes, the serious among us find it difficult to make way for humor, yet many lexicographers – some credentialed, some amateur – produce “facetious” or “jocular” dictionaries, to use Malkiel’s and Worth’s terminology, respectively. The most famous example is probably Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (Reference Bierce2003 [1911]), an example Malkiel and Worth and anyone else in 1960 would have had in mind. Its facetiousness located it on the margins of both literature and lexicography. By the twenty-first century, however, American culture had embraced satire in all media, and the number of facetious dictionaries – or dictionaries of which humor is a characteristic – has increased considerably.

Some such dictionaries are minimally humorous. Grant Barrett’s The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English: A Crunk Omnibus for Thrillionaires and Bampits for the Ecozoic Age (Reference Barrett2006) is a bona fide historical dictionary, stuffed with great quotations ranging mostly over the last hundred years – it would be much less crunk if it had a larger historical range – and including etymologies and restrictive labels. Barrett is a professional language maven, co-creator of the popular radio program A Way with Words, who also worked as a professional lexicographer. Except for the pleasure some readers may feel when encountering strange words, the dictionary’s insides are as serious as any other dictionary’s. The facetiousness is mostly on the covers, in the title, for one thing. There are relatively few illustrations inside, but there’s a big one on the front cover, of a rock star singing to his fans, accompanying the definition for ego ramp, which is “a proscenium, catwalk, runway, or stage spur that extends into or over an audience.” The back cover announces, “This is not your paleoconservative’s dictionary,” which drives one to the entry for paleoconservative (Reference BarrettBarrett 2006, 257). One might blame all of this, not on the lexicographer but on the marketing department, yet humor alleviates the dictionary’s seriousness, nonetheless.

Other examples of the facetious branch include The Idler’s Glossary (Reference Glenn and Kingwell2008) by Joshua Glenn, with drawings by Seth, in which you’ll find entries like that for ennui:

Partly, The Idler’s Dictionary is performative, an example of idling on the parts of both its author and its readers. The Future Dictionary of America (Reference Safran Foer, Eggers, Krauss and Horowitz2004) edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, and Eli Horowitz, which is filled with facetious words defined in facetious ways by famous writers, offers further opportunities to idle with a dictionary.

Is the Future Dictionary a dictionary? It is big on definitions, where one finds the most facetiousness, but there are also pronunciations and parts of speech labels, so it’s very dictionary-like, more so than many early dictionaries and enregistering glossaries. Unlike general-purpose, college, and historical dictionaries by multiple editors, the celebrities sign their entries (see Adams, Chapter 30, this volume). There’s encyclopedic information at the back, such as a typological tree of Indo-European languages, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a plate titled “Knots and Their Nicknames,” and the wholly unexpected charts of “The Negative Alphabet” and “Spaces Between Letters.” Drawings accompany entries but there are also some gloriously full-color plates. Some big dictionaries came with handy CD-ROM versions back in the olden days, but the accompanying twenty-two-track CD that accompanies the Future Dictionary has new songs from David Byrne, Death Cab for Cutie, and They Might Be Giants, among other alternative artists, is obviously not part of the dictionary text, even if it’s affixed to the book’s back cover. All the elements mentioned here, as well as its facetious text, suggest that the Future Dictionary is a parody of dictionaries, which leads to the uncomfortable question of whether a parodic dictionary is a type of dictionary, requiring yet another typological branch. The book is absolutely about entertainment, but it’s also a dictionary designed to raise funds for political action: “An unprecedented book-CD package to benefit progressive causes featuring over 200 of America’s best writers, artists & musicians.” Some dictionaries are fabricated for commercial motives (Reference AdamsAdams 2021), and I suppose that politically motivated dictionaries belong on the same or an adjacent branch of the typological tree. The Future Dictionary isn’t your paleoconservative’s dictionary, either.

Although its creator, Aaron Peckham, agrees that Urban Dictionary is not really a dictionary, or at least wasn’t conceived as one (Reference Peckham, Coleman and ColemanPeckham and Coleman 2014), it has become a reference work full of information about words, especially attitudes and ideologies underlying their use and reception and dated definitions by a host of contributors. As far as I know, none is a lexicographer, professional or amateur, but language-interested people on the street who live in digital contexts and freely contribute what they know or complain about words and usage of which they don’t approve. Because no one controls the input of entries, some are facetious, and some are straightforward, and some are both. It’s very much a culture book as well as a word book, but not organized as an encyclopedia. The scrollable definitions in an entry are interspersed with advertisements, notably for Urban Dictionary merchandise.

Clearly, Urban Dictionary is not a digital version of a classic college or general-purpose dictionary, so it cannot rest on a digital twig on traditional branches of the typological tree. Rather, it probably belongs on a twig extending from the facetious branch. Again, the lines aren’t clear but cross and tangle, with dictionary characteristics appearing where they aren’t expected. However, one can challenge dictionary typology and the definition of dictionary yet further. Among the merchandise one once could find advertised on Urban Dictionary was the 2010 Urban Dictionary calendar (Reference PeckhamPeckham 2009), hyped as “street slang on a daily.” I have not investigated this artifact bibliographically – I assume my copy is more or less like all the others. A cardboard backing is glued to a plastic tray, and the sheets of the calendar thus attached to the tray are bound with plastic on the top, so that one could flip through the calendar and tear sheets off the stack as the days of 2010 passed. Ah, you say, the Urban Dictionary calendar should be on the typological tree of calendars, not that of dictionaries.

But why? One might argue that it isn’t a book, but neither is the digital UD, and perhaps it is, anyway: the calendar pages are bound, though at the top – must English-language books be bound only on the left? (Note that, in the textual traditions of some other cultures, we find books bound on another edge, as in Arabic and Hebrew texts, which are read from right to left.) It’s organized by calendar date rather than alphabetically, but most dictionary typologists agree that alphabetical organization is only one option among modes of what Malkiel called “perspective” (for instance, Reference LandauLandau 1984, 82; Reference HüllenHüllen 1999, 11–16; Reference SvensénSvensén 2009, 23). That they don’t specifically refer to calendrical organization implies only that they never encountered a word book that employed it. Malkiel believed that the sequence of dictionary entries “may be conventional (alphabetic), semantic (ordering by ‘parts of speech’ or provinces of life [as in thesauri; see Wild, this volume], or entirely arbitrary (chaotic)” (Reference Malkiel and AdamsMalkiel 2022, 135). If a dictionary’s entries can be organized chaotically, why can’t they be organized arbitrarily by calendar date? One may prefer to read only the entry for the day at hand, tearing yesterday’s sheet off on that day, but in doing so, one turns a page, and (in my experience) those who use such calendars are not above flipping through them, unable to repress interest in what will come later. In other words, it’s a calendar but it’s a bound calendar in which one turns pages (or tears them off), so rather more like a book than it appears initially. Dedicated dictionary typologists can only wonder, “Where will it end?” and the answer, that typology is heuristic and there is no end, most likely will not satisfy them.

1.8 Conclusion

With warehouses of dictionaries to sort through, typology helps us identify characteristics of dictionaries, even if they aren’t the distinctive features Malkiel proposed. The contrasts among dictionaries help us to see relations among dictionaries – sometimes structurally, sometimes historically, sometimes both. It would be odd indeed to suggest that we should stop our typologizing, as well as counterproductive. Yet examples like those above suggest the limits of typology which, again, has more heuristic value than it describes the truth about dictionary types. “The” truth about dictionary types is, like “the” dictionary, an imaginary reduction of something various and complex to an untruthful simplicity. We need to consider the possibility that some of our dictionaries, like Lulu Miller’s fish, are more closely related to word books and even word artifacts of other types than to other dictionaries as the metalexicographers’ typologies describe them, and that we’re just as unlikely to stop considering them dictionaries as we are to reconsider the folk status of species we currently assume are fish. Sometimes, techniques of rationality correspond less well to phenomena, natural and cultural, than we expect them to, for products of culture, like dictionaries, also resist descriptive edges and hard lines, and typologies may end up snapshots of chaos in motion.

It’s also the case, however, that given their heuristic value, typologies provide just one limited perspective on dictionaries. All of the typologies agree on the major branches, so this handbook includes chapters on historical dictionaries, thesauri (historical and otherwise), general-purpose dictionaries (from the unabridged to the pocket), bilingual dictionaries, learner’s dictionaries, children’s dictionaries, and dictionaries of quotations and proverbs. One can usefully consider dictionaries type by type, but typologies cannot capture the motives for making or reading/using dictionaries, nor do they account for the cultural effects of dictionaries – typologies may be a necessary heuristic but cannot serve as a sufficient explanation of the dictionary phenomenon. The rest of the handbook stretches toward that sufficiency, though dictionaries are numerous enough (and expanding in number), various enough (and we still invent new types), and complicated enough (because people can make them for innumerable reasons and users use them for innumerable different reasons) that sufficiency lies always on a scholarly horizon.