Classics 22: Etymology

D-I-C-T-I-O-N-A-R-I-E-S

Why talk about dictionaries? Because they are a dissection of the language. They take it apart word by word and making them involves many decisions and policies that take a stance about what language is and what we do with it.

Descriptive versus Prescriptive dictionaries

A descriptive dictionary's aim is to record how headwords are actually used, not to tell people how to use them.
A prescriptive dictionary's aim is to tell people the correct way to use words.
The problem is that the most common use people find for dictionaries is to determine the correct way to spell or use a headword, and so they are used for prescriptive purposes even if the dictionary crafters' aim is to be descriptive.

Sample word:

"Disinterested" versus "uninterested"
It is often maintained that "uninterested" means "not interested" and "disinterested" means "impartial," but 20% of the uses of "disinterested" found in the British National Corpus use it to mean "not interested." What is more, the first use of it found uses it to mean "not interested."

What is a Word?

Howard Jackson suggests: "a sequence of letters bounded by spaces" (P.1 of Lexicography)

Why is that inadequate?

Because srtghxdcfgsdt is not a word, but it is a sequence of letters bounded by spaces.
Reference codes for airline reservations or on-line orders are not words, but they are sequences of letters bounded by spaces.

So perhaps we should say "a sequence of letters that is pronounceable and is bounded by spaces."

No: thudruff is clearly pronounceable and bounded by spaces.

What is more, some "words" just are not written: consider that word that might be spelled "aiight": clearly it is a word, but it simply is not spelled.

find a better example if you disagree about aiight! How about that 'nuhn-unh' that kids use? or a two-year old's 'uppie' that means a variety of things including 'put me on your shoulders'

And what of languages that do not have writing? Don't they have words?

maybe they don't!

All of this makes clear the fact that definitions do not occur in a vacuum: they must have a context.

The context of Jackson's definition is lexicography. Clearly, he is talking about things that are part of a language, so the context rules out srtghxdcfgsdt, thudruff, reference codes, idiosyncratic toddle talk, and slang. Also, he is clearly talking about words in the context of lexicography, and that necessarily involves writing. Even if he is talking about making a lexicon for an unwritten language, nonetheless he is clearly talking about writing them down for his work, so whether a word is out there in written form is irrelevant to his context.

The question is still very difficult: what is a word?

We all have an intuitive grasp of it, but we cannot articulate a definition that includes every word, includes only words, and includes nothing else. A good definition of anything should do that: include every instance, only those instances, and nothing else.

Jackson suggests differentiating between the following (I've added ideas to Jackson here):

Orthographic word: a sequence of letters bounded by spaces

This is in many ways inadequate: why do we bound some sequences with spaces? What principles lie behind that? If we could identify those principles, they would constitute a linguistic definition of "word."

Phonological word: a sequence of sounds

that, if written, would be bounded by spaces?
that remains the same sequence of sounds in many different utterances?

small problem: the way we pronounce a word changes depending on what comes before or after it, even if subtly.
solution: change to "a sequence of phonemes that remains the same in many different utterances?

And what of homophones? how do we say they are "different" words?

could add "with high correlation to a certain meaning or set of meanings"

Lexeme: any meaningful speech form in the vocabulary of a language.

Query: do lexemes include abbreviations (I mean the ones that have not transformed into words, such as wysiwyg or radar).
Does it include affixes (like -iz- in "Gizoogle" or "-nik" in peacenik or nogoodnik)?

some definitions of lexeme do include them, some exclude them.

but they aren't words, are they?

Often, lexeme is used in another sense: it is used for all the members of a group of words that are inflections of the same word: for example, 'run, runs, ran, running' is said to be one lexeme.

An individual lexeme usually has a distinct syntactic function: thus "bad" and "badly" are two lexemes, because they fulfill adjectival and adverbial functions.
The unit which the dictionary chooses by convention to list a lexeme under is called the lemma: you look up "ran" under the lemma "run" for example.

Even the lemma of a lexeme may consist of more than one orthographic or phonological word: rain dance is one lexeme, although it is two orthographic words.

What is a headword?

A headword is a lemma that represents its lexeme: the form of a word chosen by convention to be listed in the dictionary (see above for lemma)

A headword is also the explanandum in a dictionary entry: the thing that you look up in the dictionary and the dictionary's task is to explain.

explanandum is Latin for "the thing that has to be explained"

Every lexeme is potentially a headword. Thus a headword may be more than one word (e.g. rain dance).
Abbreviations and affixes are potentially headwords as well: thus not all headwords are words (depending on how we define word).

Sometimes two headwords are orthographically and phonologically identical: they are homonyms. In that case, one or both of the following is/are the reason why they are two headwords:

They have different etymologies.

They are different parts of speech

technically, this is the same as having different etymologies, because:

either one of those words always derives from the other (which makes the words have different etymologies)

if one does not derive from the other, they simply have different etymologies

Two separate lexemes with the same spelling and pronunciation are homonyms.

Two separate lexemes with the same spelling but different pronunciations are homographs.

Two separate lexemes with different spellings but the same pronunciation are homophones.

Some "headwords" actually consist of more than one word:

A "rain dance" is a dance, but it is not rain, and the definitions of "rain" and "dance" will not necessarily tell you what a rain dance is any more than the etymology of a word will tell you its meaning.

Thus "rain dance" needs a separate entry.

There are different sorts of multiple-word lexemes:

compounds are lexemes that consist of two words, such as "attorney general": they are often called "open compounds" to distinguish them from "solid" compound words like "cupboard" and hyphenated compounds like "green-eyed."
Phrasal lexemes are multi-word lexemes such as "place in the sun," "writer's block," "ups and downs," and "hook, line, and sinker," which have a unitary meaning that is not derivable from the independent meanings of their components.
Idioms may be phrases or whole sentences: they are typically metaphorical or figurative.

"Idiom" may have more than one sense: the sense used here is a piece of language whose meaning does not match the typical meaning of its elements.
So when you say "Birds of a feather flock together," what you mean is something like "like attracts like" or "like things tend to be found together", and very rarely are you talking about birds, feathers, or flocking.
When you say "an odd duck" you are rarely talking about a duck.
Such things come as units and can't be broken down into parts that constitute the whole.
These things require their own definition separate from the definitions of their parts.

Remember, some "words" are not headwords!

"talked," "sung," "warbles," "doing," "quicker," and "songs" are not separate headwords.
These are "variants," "word-forms," "inflections" or "forms" of the lemma of a lexeme, because they fit regular patterns of usage that specify how a single lexeme can vary depending on its function in language.

What is an entry?

Everything listed under a single headword plus the headword.
other forms of the word, part of speech, definition, pronunciation, etymology: anything else?

Aspects of "Meaning":

Dictionaries record how words are used, not reality, not what things actually are: in fact, arguably, language cannot escape itself, and yet ...

Reference: words often 'refer' to an entity such as a feeling, action, quality, quantity, relationship, idea, etc.

Generally speaking, we agree about what words refer to: that is part of what makes language work: by referring to something via a word, I can reliably call that thing to your mind too.

Words referring to physical objects are perhaps the easiest case.

Other words are more problematic: "long," "deferential," "rectitude," or "think" for examples. And yet, the notion of "reference" still works for those words.

What about words such as "about," "the," and "whatever"?

They too can be said to refer to entities, but the entities are sometimes more vague, often relational, sometimes abstractions (of abstractions) rather than isolatable "things."

We'll leave to philosophers questions about whether 'reference' can ever really work, how it works, etc.: not that such questions are not super interesting and important.

Connotation versus denotation

Denotation is the "ordinary, straightforward" thing that a word refers to.

"Dog" refers to a canine animal.
"Champagne" refers to a kind of wine.

Connotations are the associations of the word.

"Dog" refers to

a dirty, mean, and repulsive creature that nearly killed me as a child and should be driven to extinction by any means possible OR

a friendly, playful, always-reliable member of the family that I cannot imagine living without.

"Champagne" usually carries connotations of extravagance, celebration, and luxury.
Some connotations should be in the dictionary, some not ("champagne" should probably have its connotations noted, but the connotations of "dog" above don't seem as relevant).

There must be some widespread agreement about the connotation for it to be appropriate to be listed in the dictionary.

Context: words that are "synonymous" may be synonymous only in certain contexts or may be appropriate only in certain contexts:

"Transpire," "materialize" and "occur" are more formal.
"Happen" is neither formal nor informal: it's a sort of default word.
"Go down, " "go on," "be up," or "shake" are colloquial.
"Shake" is perhaps restricted to only certain populations.
"Shake" with the meaning "happen" is largely restricted to one phrase: "what's shakin'?" and adding the g is inappropriate.
"befall" sounds old-fashioned.

Thus the words listed above are synonymous in a way, but in important ways, they are not, because you cannot simply substitute any one for any other.

Lexical fields

Words fall into "fields": that is, groupings of words that are united by a factor they share. The following fields are useful for dictionaries, particularly when crafting definitions:

Synonymy

The English, French/Latin, and more purely Latin strata of English often have synonyms:

end, finish, terminate
sin, trespass, transgression
hatred, enmity, animosity
Clearly, the Latinate ones are usually more formal, while the English ones are more everyday.

Different dialects create synonyms:

rubbers, galoshes
car park, parking lot
kirk (Scottish), church

Hyponyms and hypernyms

Some words are more general (hypernyms) than the words that refer to specific subsets (hyponyms)

and both hypernym and hyponym are relational words, like your mother: your grandmother is your mother's mother, and your mother is your grandmother's daughter. So what she is (mother or grandmother or daughter or ...) is determined by the context, the answer to the question "what is she in relation to what?"
Applied to the dictionary:

Implement or utensil are synonymous hypernyms for the hyponyms serving utensil, kitchen gadget, cutlery

Cutlery is a hypernym) for the hyponyms knife, fork, and spoon.
Spoon is the hypernymfor the hyponyms teaspoon, tablespoon, and ladle .

One very helpful way to define a word is to start with its immediate hypernym:

a spoon is a piece of ______ that.... (fill in the blank with cutlery)
a teaspoon is a spoon that ....
cutlery is a set of implements that ...

Meronymy

Some words refer to parts of a thing

Ball, heel, instep, and toes are meronyms of foot.
Meronymy is another very good way to define words:

the heel is: the part of the foot that ...
the toe is: the part of the foot that ...

Definitions:

Some terminology

definiendum refers to the item being defined.
definiens refers to the definition.

"Defining" a word usually involves:

only/mostly words that are in the defining vocabulary of the dictionary

based on the principle that one should use words simpler than the word being defined to define a word.
Defining Vocabulary is the list of words that can be used for definitions in a dictionary.

It would be bad to define 'surgery' as 'operation' and then turn around and define 'operation' as 'surgery.'
So it seems like a good idea, epistemologically, to use basic words in definitions, and not to define words simply by using synonyms, right?
But what about the basic words? What do you use to define them?
Is circularity inevitable?
Is all circularity 'vicious': can't it be 'virtuous'?
Some words are so basic they cannot be defined, only described. Consider 'the'!

substitutability: the definition is a phrase that can be substituted for the word itself without loss or gain of meaning

let's go look at some definitions in a dictionary to see this (and them come back here)

a special case of this is "synonymous cross-reference" where the dictionary lists a synonym rather than or in addition to a definition: W3 uses all-caps for these.
substitutability requires that the definition begin with a word that is the same part of speech as the word being defined.

avoiding circularity: don't define pants as "trousers" and trousers as "pants."
these matters are full of philological/philosophical issues: what if you cannot easily or well define a word such as "whole" except in terms of parts and you cannot define "part" except in terms of wholes?

always remember that how people use the words is different from what is true or accurate or verifiable about the external world.

Patterns of definition

"genus + differentiae"

also called "analytic"
hypernyms are genera and hyponyms are species

and a species is identified by the differentiae that make it different from other species in the same genus

recipe for a genus + differentiae definition: take a hypernym of the headword to be defined, then add the specific qualities that make for that headword:

horse for example, has the hypernym "mammal"
add "solid-hoofed, plant-eating" and whatever else must be added to identify all and only horses amongst the mammals. These added items are the differentiae.
horse: a solid-hoofed, plant-eating (etc.) mammal.

here is MWU's definition of 'horse':

"a large solid-hoofed herbivorous mammal (Equus caballus) domesticated by humans since a prehistoric period and used as a beast of burden, a draft animal, or for riding, and distinguished from the other existing members of the genus Equus and family Equidae by the long hair of the mane and tail, the usual presence of a callosity on the inside of the hind leg below the hock, and other less constant characters (as the larger size, larger hooves, more arched neck, small head, short ears)"

this style of definition is not at all restricted to animals

the adjective clean might be defined using the hypernym "free (from)" (as in "not having any") and adding the differentiae "from dirt, stain, or other defilement."

MWU defines 'clean' as: "free from matter that adulterates, contaminates, or pollutes"

absolute could be defined in one sense as "free from imperfection of fault"
accurate = "free from error or mistake"
achromatic = "free from color"
etc.

glamour might be defined using the hypernym "attractiveness" and adding differentiae to make "a romantic, exciting, and often illusory attractiveness"

meronymy

Definitions which begin, "the part of ____ which ..." use meronymy.

synonymous cross-reference

discussed above
can create circularity

sometimes web-like rather than circular, in which case the circularity is less problematic because it offers many entry points for people to understand and use the definition

specifying what is typical of the definiendum

This is not a separate way to define words: it is used in addition to one of the above, typically in addition to the analytic mode.
Example:

gingham is "lightweight plain-woven cotton cloth, typically checked"
a genus-differentiae definition with the addition of a typical but not defining quality.

specifying usage (see below)

This is more an explanation or description than a substitutable definition of the headword (see below)

MWU has one sense of "crap" as:

slang, sometimes vulgar : something deceitful, useless, or empty : NONSENSE, RUBBISH

Description and explanation

Description and explanation includes those elements of a dictionary entry that are not the definition or the lemma or the etymology: it includes usage, context, and connotation notes, as well as things like date of first instance, examples of the word in a sentence, among other things.
Some words need not be defined, or cannot be defined: they can only be described and explained.

Examples:

Inflected forms: there is no need for a separate definition of "octopuses" in addition to that of "octopus" or of "deflate" and "deflated."
Abbreviations: they often just need the full version of what they abbreviate.
Contractions: It's does not need a definition, just "it is."
The most basic words in a language: I and the for instance are not defined, but they are described.
Interjections often have usage descriptions rather than definitions: huh? and uh-huh for example.

Polysemy

Many words have more than one meaning, aka "polysemy."

How many separate meanings a word has is, to some extent, subjective: different dictionaries differ in the number of senses given for the same words.

Generally, a word gets a separate headword entry only if it has a distinct etymology or is a different part of speech from any homographs that exist: that is not really polysemy

for real polysemy, a single word with a unique etymology must have >1 meaning/sense.

Within one dictionary entry, obviously the different senses must be set in some order.

Historical orderings:

Oldest to youngest (Oxford English Dictionary does this)
Youngest to oldest

There is a problem: sometimes words have branches of meaning that develop in parallel, in which case historical orderings become chaotic to impossible.
Another problem: sometimes it is unclear which is older or younger

REMEMBER that what a word meant when it first appeared is not at all the most important or the most common meaning today, and certainly is not the 'true' meaning.

Frequency

Most common meaning first, followed by other meanings in descending order of frequency

Usually a subjective matter,
but practical for the user

Core or 'focal' meaning(s) followed by the senses that developed from the core(s)

sometimes the "core" meaning, the one that others expand upon, is neither the oldest nor the youngest nor the commonest one.
So this sort of ordering is different from historical and frequency-based orderings.
Perhaps the 'core meaning' of 'game' is 'a playful or competitive activity' (from wiktionary).
Perhaps the focal meaning of 'being' derives from 'substance': so says Aristotle

Usage patterns

Some words simply like the company of certain other words, sometimes exclusively:

You lift or impose or put a ban and it is on someone or something.

Thus the noun ban has a limited usage that is very typically restricted to those verbs and that preposition.
But it can certainly be used elsewhere, so this is a statistical notion, not an invariable rule.
And the verb ban is much more broadly useful.

But the words lift, put and impose and on have far more uses than just in connection with ban, and so it makes sense to give information at the entry for ban about how to use ban that includes those others words, but it does not make as much sense to give that information at the entries for lift, impose, or on.

Pronunciations

There is as much to be said, or more, about pronunciations in a dictionary as there is to be said about meanings.
Interestingly, many dictionaries now simply have recordings of the pronunciation(s) of a word.

And we have not even mentioned the etymology section, or the part of speech...

but that's 'nuff dictionary theory for now: let's look at dictionaries

Here's the most famous one, historically:

So how did dictionaries develop until Samuel Johnson published his famous dictionary?

History of Dictionaries
First, a smattering of predecessors to English dictionaries: a show-and-tell designed to demonstrate that dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, thesauruses, etc. as they now exist are far from obvious products.

There are Akkadian cuneiform word lists that serve as an Akkadian-Sumerian bilingual dictionary of sorts: 3rd. millennium BCE
Babylonians also had such word-lists for other purposes: 2nd millennium BCE Babylonian word lists (a good explanation of such lists : wikipedia has some nice illustrations)

the "dictionary" seems to have been more like a "scriptionary" as it seems designed to record how to write cuneiform as well as to record the words of Sumerian/Akkadian (or whatever language is being written).
Comparison to modern dictionaries: as opposed to our dictionaries, these lexical lists are thematically organized and consist of just words (no explanation, etc), nothing like 'alphabetic' order, but there may be an order of complexity of the cuneiform signs

There is a 3rd c. BCE Chinese dictionary called the Erya; the first monolingual 'dictionary': arranged thematically (characters cannot be "alphabetical": modern Chinese dictionaries are arranged by number of strokes).

this is not a dictionary, but rather a collection of explanations ('glosses') on specific passages from written works.

Greek
Photo By Marsyas (2007), CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=471575

Philitas of Cos, 4th century BCE, wrote a work that is now lost: it was called ataktoi glossai ('disordered words') and explained difficult words in Homer and elsewhere. He is part of a group of Hellenistic scholars who were associated with Alexandria and started up many scholarly traditions.

Papyrus that quotes Philitas

the tradition of writing explanations of difficult words continued ...
Hesychius of Alexandria, probably 4th c. CE (that is 600 or more years after Philitas), wrote a 50,000-entry lexicon of difficult words, and it was in alphabetical order!

Hesychius' preface says that his work is based on many predecessors whom he names, but we don't have much of any of their writings left.
In other words, between Philitas and Hesychius, a tradition developed, and Hesychius is a flowering of that tradition.

Philo of Biblos probably wrote the first work we would call a 'thesaurus' in the Greek tradition: 2nd. c CE
A massive flowering of the tradition: the "Suda" which has recently been put online by a massive group-effort: Suda on line: a huge 10th c. CE Byzantine lexicon that is more like an encyclopedic gazetteer than a dictionary, but has elements of both. Alphabetical order is the principle.

Sanskrit had the Amarakosha अमरकोशः (wikipedia entry), dated from ca. 4th c. to 7th c. CE: perhaps more like a thesaurus than a dictionary : arranged thematically. An alternative title is Nāmalinganushāsanaman नामलिङ्गानुशासनम् ('name-gender-instruction', 'explanation of nouns and gender').
Arabic

"Abu ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad ibn ‘Amr ibn Tammām al-Farāhīdī al-Azdī al-Yaḥmadī (Arabic: أبو عبد الرحمن الخليل بن أحمد الفراهيدي‎; 718 – 786 CE), more commonly known as Al-Farahidi or simply Al-Khalīl" (quoted from Wikipedia entry: note that ibn ‘Amr ibn Tammām and al-Azdī al-Yaḥmadī are missing from the Arabic version )

the order he followed was from the letter pronounced deepest in the throat (ayn) forward to those pronounced with the lips. So it's even better than merely alphabetic: it's a linguistic order! (Devanagāri, the Sanskrit abjad, is also arranged in linguistic order)
it is a dictionary of roots that have to be affixed with pre-, in-, and suf-fixes to make words: so it is a dictionary of things that could be made into words. A root word dictionary.

LATIN
de Significatu Verborum by Verrius Flaccus (1st c. CE), now lost, but revised later by Sextus Pompeius Festus (late 2nd c. CE), and then abridged and revised again by Paul the Deacon, is the earliest Latin dictionary I know of.

included the meanings and an attempt at the etymology of words: etymology at the time was just whatever seemed similar and had no real linguistic rigor.
encyclopedic elements: it is important for many cultural things that a dictionary would not contain in our day: military, historical, mythological matters
half of a mutilated manuscript of Festus exists, scorched and no longer bound
There is apparently a "Festus Lexicon Project" underway that aims to publish the contents of that manuscript insofar as possible.

Here ends the show-and-tell of a sampling of works that prefigure dictionaries and show that the modern genre of a dictionary is far from obvious or 'natural.'
And here begins the part of the story that leads directly to our dictionaries, in a somewhat more progressive line of succession...

English dictionaries, however, apparently began as ...

Inter-linear Anglo-saxon glosses by Farman and Owun in the Lindisfarne Gospels (8th c. CE with glosses added in the 10th c. CE): scroll down in that link for the "Rushworth gloss."

Not a complete translation, but it is the earliest English Bible, in a way.
For the Latin version of the page displayed in the link above, see starting at verse 24 in: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Lucas%2023&version=VULGATE;NIV

Glosses were eventually collected in a "glossary"

In the middle ages, "grammar schools" arose to teach Latin (babies were no longer learning Latin, because the various vernaculars had turned into independent languages): they needed teaching materials, and so general-purpose Latin-English and English-Latin school glossaries were created.

In the Renaissance, there was a strong effort to translate the surviving works of antiquity into vernacular languages, which put pressure on the vernacular languages.

Often, there was no good word available in English, so the translators Anglicized a Latin word. Glossaries were created to explain these neologisms.

A parallel development was that bilingual glossaries arose between English and other languages, such as French.

John Minsheu published Hegemon eis tas glossas (Early English Books Online: available via UVM libraries) 1617, which contained English, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, "Belgian," "Gallic," German, and several others (UVM Rare Book Collection has a physical copy!). Only about 200 pages.

The first English dictionaries: the "hard" words tradition

There was a controversy raging in the 16th and 17th century over so-called "inkhorn" terms (an inkhorn is an inkpot, and so a scholar's tool). An inkhorn term is a word that duplicates an already existing English word and so is held to be superfluous.

Robert Cawdrey, in 1604, published A Table Alphabeticall
(a transcription of the text).

The first monolingual work that clearly qualifies as a dictionary: "hard" words were explained in plainer English (often simply via synonyms). 2543 entries.
Drew from previous English-Latin dictionaries and other works that explicated words.
But had obvious lexicographic ideas: standardization of entries.

Henry Cockeram's The English Dictionarie of 1623 was the first to use the word "dictionary" in its title (UVM Rare Book Collection owns a copy): >5800 entries

Has many ghost words (words found only in dictionaries).

Bullokar's An English Expositor appeared in 1616, and underwent several editions, one of which incorporated Cockeram's material.

Bullokar not only explained "hard" words, but he also gave more elevated equivalents for simple terms.

Thomas Blount's Glossographia of 1656 added etymological information and source information

Several more "hard" words dictionaries came out, some including "cant" (thieves' slang) and dialect words.

The next step: "all" words

Nathaniel Bailey's 1721 An Universal Etymological English Dictionary attempted both complete coverage of English and also combined that with etymology. It went thru many editions and was the standard for the 18th century.

Bailey produced Dictionarium Britannicum in 1730, which went through several editions as well.

Included pronunciation indications

Experts in math and botany as well as other modern languages were contributors.

By this point, the basics of what we consider a dictionary were in place.
The next chapter in English dictionaries: Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, first edition 1755

Was THE standard dictionary for over 170 years.
It was a huge undertaking, both for Johnson as a scholar, but also to print: comparable to printing the bible in size.
At this point, books were fairly common and many people could read: hence there was demand for such a product.
Johnson towers over his predecessors.

he is very very careful and cites examples of usage and is willing to spend a lot of time and space teasing out senses of a word.
he is prescriptivist, telling people what to do rather than recording what people do with their native language
he favors spellings that are often more complex than the simplified ones that Webster would use later
because comparative linguistics had not yet arrived on the scene, his etymologies are not great
his pronunciation guides are not linguistically as careful as one would like
his dictionary was huge and expensive: although it is outstanding, it was sold for over $700 of today's dollars.

He was not without humor, only very occasionally:

Lexicographer: "a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words"
Oats: "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"
Monsieur: "a term of reproach for a Frenchman"

Next chapter: Spelling was standardized around the beginning of the 19th century, particularly by Noah Webster, of Merriam-Webster Dictionary fame.

Elsewhere in Europe, France had founded in 1635 the Académie française whose charge was to establish correct French usage and to promote it.

the Dictionnaire de l'académie française was started in 1639 and finished in 1694 (1718 marked a second edition).

Spurred the English on: hence Johnson's dictionary...

other language regulators exist for many languages currently

In England, there was a debate: should an to the French effort officially establish correct English be mounted?

Samuel Johnson opposed the idea.

Related to ghost words are dords, which are words that are the result of mistakes in dictionaries.

dord is from the entry in the 1934 Webster's dictionary "Dord: density," which apparently should have been "D or d: density" and thereby identified the letter d as an abbreviation for density.
Find me more dords, please.

There are also "Mountweazels"