Often regarded as comprehensive, impartial and authoritative works, monolingual dictionaries of the standard variety of English have never been neutral repositories of vocabulary. Instead, they have acted as vehicles for ideologies of one sort or another, transmitting societal values as well as linguistic information. All dictionary-makers make decisions on whose and which words to include and to exclude; equally all gather and process these words in ways that influence their presentation to the dictionary-user, employing editorial methods and technological means that have varied from one period to another. This chapter focuses on Johnson’s Dictionary and successive versions of the Oxford English Dictionary in an historically organised account of dictionaries to the present day, noting the under-representation in these two works of women as language-producers. It also discusses editions of the Webster dictionaries, of twentieth-century desk dictionaries before and after the introduction of corpus-based lexicography, and online dictionaries.

This chapter looks beyond the temporal scope of the rest of book to the legacy of the OED’s empirical principles for contemporary dictionaries. The chapter argues that there are limitations inherent in any lexicographical model whose aim is to document a language as it is commonly and widely used. Though this ‘majority rule’ approach may seem democratic, it cannot help but marginalize people whose practices or identities—and the language by which they express them—diverge from dominant norms. While digital advances have enabled new ways of making dictionaries, from corpus-building to online crowdsourcing, these have not allowed lexicographers to evade the ideological pitfalls that surround the documentation of ‘minority usage’, whether present or past. The chapter closes with a reflection on the future of historical research into language and sexuality, both within the dictionary and beyond it.