As I mentioned on the Twit Machine recently, I have been working on a very exciting project: a new edition of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.
“About frickin’ time!” fans of the Third hollered in one thunderous voice, and with good reason: the Third was released in 1961. It has been updated by means of an Addenda Section once every seven or so years, but an A-Z revision has been long overdue. We will be the first people to tell you that, longingly, as we peer out from underneath the production schedule.
And so we’ve begun the long, slow work of revising and updating. There is a stately surrealism to stripping down and refurbishing of one of America’s most celebrated and controversial dictionaries, kind of like taking the Pope underwear-shopping. When you get right down to it, you are left there in your small mortality, looking at the boxer-briefs of something that has been revered and hallowed for longer than you’ve been on this earth, and that is unsettling.
Nonetheless, here I am, staring intently at the varicosities of the Third and doing my best to patch them up.
Over the years, I’ve been asked why we don’t just slap some new words into the Third while we’re mucking about with new Collegiate editions. Hell, it’s just data, my dictionary-loving friends would say. It’s just an entry. It’ll only take you two extra minutes.
I have discovered that it’s not just an entry, and it’s not just two extra minutes, because of something called “cross-reference.”
Every dictionary you use has rules about the words entered therein, and one of the basic rules of any decent dictionary is that you cannot use a word in the definitions, usage notes, or example sentences that is not defined somewhere, somehow in that very dictionary. That sounds sensible, but you’d be surprised how many discount dictionaries don’t follow this rule–and what a difficult rule it is to follow, even in this digital age. In order to make sure that this rule is followed, we have a whole group of editors whose job is to beat the track of the alphabet, hoovering up all the information they can about the words in this book, and making everything tidy.
I was recently pulled from doing some subject-specific defining and put on the ever expanding task of making sure new entries are entered properly into the data. Part of this involves some cross-reference work, but “not a lot,” as the Director of Editorial Operations put it. “Just a bit.”
Silly me, I took “just a bit” at face value. In fact, “just a bit” means “there’s quite a lot and you will only find and correct a little bit of it.”
My very first entry gave me trouble. There was a word in a quotation that looked odd. I don’t think that’s supposed to be hyphenated, I thought, and so I went to the Third. No, indeed, it was entered in the Third as a closed compound, and I patted myself on the back for being so observant. Mid-pat, I realized I then had to do something about that.
There are options available to the editor doing cross-reference, but none of them is easy. The simplest choice is to alter the quotation to omit the troublesome word. Of course, as luck would have it, this wasn’t possible in this case, as the word to be omitted was the verb of the sentence, and a verbless example sentence was certainly going to raise a few eyebrows when this new dictionary came out. Well, then, I’d just have to find another quotation to sub in. Off to the citation files, where I found the absolute perfect substitute. Oh, it was gorgeous: short, idiomatic, completely covering the contextual meaning and connotation of the word in question, and the author’s name made me giggle (last name: Butters). This was it. After running it through the cross-reference gauntlet, I discovered it used two words not entered in this dictionary.
The next option is to see if the compounding style of this word is going to change at all in the new edition. We base this on citational information, so a quick search of the database showed be that the hyphenated and closed compounds had roughly the same amount of use. I shoot an e-mail to the Director of Defining and ask him if he has any advice. His response is, “Look through the revision files. Quickly.” Because like all dictionaries, this one has a deadline and we will make many, many people (not least of whom, the Publisher) sad if we push it back.
The revision files yield many surprises, chief of which is that some of the entries in it are from editors who came and went 20 years ago–the Third has, let’s remember, been in need of revision for a long time–and their notes have been appended by successive generations of editors who are correcting or reiterating their point. (“Style was once open; now determinedly hyphenated. A. Editor, 1982.” “Style now closed; ignore previous note. B. Editor, 1986.” “Word is open compound. Ignore A. & B., they are morons. C. Editor, 1992.”) I open one notes file. It is several hundred pages long.
After some searching, I find a note for this entry that leads me to believe that the hyphenated compound will not be entered. I make an assortment of irritated editorial noises and, after opening the cit files again, start looking for a third replacement sentence. An hour has gone by and I have spent it on one quotation at one entry. The word I am agonizing over is not even the word I’m entering: it is peripheral, incidental. But when you are doing cross-reference, nothing is peripheral or incidental.
Some variation of this continues for the rest of the letter, then progressive batches, and the number of annoying e-mails I send to my colleagues skyrockets. I can almost hear the server groan when I hit “New Message” and begin my fourteenth e-mail of the day to one of the science editors. “Me again. What are you going to do with ‘thumb drive’? I’m sure you haven’t even given it a thought, but can you give it one for me in, say, the next ten minutes?” I send more e-mails to the Director of Defining. “Howdy. Do you have any thoughts on how to handle the expansion of ‘HIPAA’?” And again, later: “One more: can I edit ‘douche-canoe’ down to ‘douche …’ in this quotation for ‘bromantic,’ or will I have to enter a new sense of ‘canoe’? If I’m doing that, should I just enter ‘douche-canoe’?”
It’s not just a matter of hunting down compounding styles. There are the new entries that require other new entries, each of those requiring two new entries, one of which will require substantial revision to another four entries, two of which will require new etymologies. One medical entry requires that I re-open 9 letters for revision and ask our Pronunciation Editor for six new prons in letters he’d already done. It takes me four hours to enter all this into the file.
At one point, I spend time trying to find a better quotation for a word to avoid the dread hyphenated-but-not-entered-as-such compound, only to discover 30 minutes into my search that the hyphen in question is actually an end-of-line break, and so not a real hyphen at all. The only upside to this is that the quotation I can now retain was written by someone with another chortle-inducing name. We take joy where we can find it.
Every inquiry leads me down a garden path of more inquiry, until I am lost in the weeds and just want to lie down in the grass and sleep for many years. I’m in so many different letters at once, I can’t tell you where I am in the project. (Here the Publisher frowns.) And here is the most perverse thing of all: even with all the time I’m putting in making sure that all these entries are tidy, there is no way I will catch every cross-reference error. Words that I assume are entered are not; styles that I assume are fine will be changed; words will be dropped or modified during copyediting, setting off another string of cross-reference changes. When I try to explain what the cross-reference work is like to another general definer, I sum it up by saying, “Google ‘ping-pong balls, mousetraps, and nuclear chain reaction.’” The ping-pong balls are the entries. All those sprung, upended mousetraps are me.
That is why we have Cross-Reference, the stalwart department who does this for every damn book we publish. Cross-Reference consists of the sweetest people on the editorial floor, but make no mistake: they are brilliant in ways that blabbering dilettantes like me cannot possibly comprehend. Consider: I have only done cross-reference work digitally, but there are people in our Cross-Ref department who remember the days when they did this by hand–when checking on the proposed styling of a new entry involved a silent plod across the editorial floor, a short aerobics routine that involved carefully lifting and stacking galleys, and tens of thousands of index cards. At one point, I asked one of the Cross-Ref editors how they knew that a styling change would be made later in the alphabet. “Oh,” she said, “you just keep track. Most of it just sticks in there, in all those nooks and crannies in your mind.”
I considered, not for the first time, that I must I have a very smooth brain.
They not only catch mistakes, but are lightning fast. They have to be: by the time they get a finished dictionary, they usually only have a few weeks to do their work before the book is due at the printer’s, and the printer gets very cranky if we are late. When the defining work is done, everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief and we celebrate with doughnuts, but no one gives a thought to the tireless drudges who are still–quietly, cheerfully–making sure that we haven’t used “douche-canoe” in an entry without defining it. There is very little glory in lexicography, and where there is glory, definers and etymologists get it all. But Cross-Ref are the ones who actually deserve it.
So when you read a dictionary entry in the new unabridged and have to look up another word in said book, raise a glass to the masterful editors of Cross-Reference, and be very glad that I am not one of them.
kory stamper 
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